Winer: "In the last few months I've been paying steadily increasing bandwidth surcharges due to exploding use of my RSS feed. HTML access is also increasing at substantial rates." Also see:
"RSS traffic is growing out of control" (Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger).
Oh cry me a river: you want a lot of people to read you, but when you've crossed some undefined traffic threshold you complain that it's costing too much; well, get rid of your feed then and shut up!
RSS is great, long live RSS, but if I'd have to guess, only bloggers, Internet 'power users', haxxors, and the Slashdot crowd are really using the technology regularly.
The total size of the folks who even understand the basic concepts behind RSS is probably just a tiny fraction of total Net users.
So it's going to be up to developers to fix this problem before Grandma figures out what those little orange XML buttons mean, because that's when you'll have a real bandwidth problem.
RSS is a lot like push -- remember Pointcast -- and push, he died when admins saw their networks getting chewed up; aside, though, I do love the idea of RSS inside of corporate and organizational networks as a way to share information.
When RSS concepts start getting baked into set-top boxes, ala concepts like BitTorrent+RSS, these issues better be solved, or no greedy VCs will make any money and the technology will die a quick death.
On the other hand, I guess there really is a price to pay -- in real dollars -- to be a popular, A-list blogger, something I wouldn't know a thing about.
But like that pop philosopher J-Lo once said, even if you were broke, my love don't cost a thing.