As usual, some of the most thoughtful commenting on the Web revolves around Dave Winer. Here’s an insightful comment on his posts about the “RSS is dead” meme.

What I love about RSS, is it’s an open source technology so to speak. No Cisco, Microsoft, IBM or any company for that matter has an interest. It’s a broadcasting system. I don’t see how it could possibly ‘die,’ go away, or be replaced. I actually see it getting stronger and stronger as the depths of the Internet get deeper and deeper. Publishers love the ability of their content to be disseminated in far off lands because ultimately they get the linkback, gain new followers, gain ad impressions, the list goes on…

In a way, it’s like saying the current pipe network stemming from the water company delivering me water to my house will go away. Possible, but doubtful. Even so, if we all have an ‘eco-friendly’ water tower built on the roofs of our house, and an underground water collection network in our backyard that collects excess rain water, purifies it, and eventually delivers it to our sinks and showers, the water (content) is still being delivered through a pipe (rss) to my water tank (aggregator, end-user). The pipe is necessary to get from point A to point B, even if we are in space and the shortest distance between two points is a curved line. There is still a pipe involved, whether it is physical or abstract.

We seem to always go down these types of roads every time a new technology is introduced (i.e. Twitter) that gains a large following. Everyone thinks it’s the end of civilization. Twitter is RSS. It’s a pipe. Diversification would say you are safest when you don’t put all your eggs in one basket (in one pipe), so are we really that stupid to rely on one delivery system (Twitter) to deliver us the goods?