Some arguments in the blogosphere whether “RSS is Dead” or not. Fred Wilson, as usual, makes the correct observation that:

But RSS is way more than the readers it spawned. It is a fundamental part of the Internet architecture and is used for all sorts of things. It’s the subscribe system of the internet and a ‘default function’ in the Internet operating system…

Quoting Kid Mercury, he continues:

i think the problem stems from the fact that the geeks embraced RSS and thought it would be a consumer technology. but alas, it was not meant to be.

Which is exactly my argument about plumbing from a couple of weeks ago. It’s interesting that Fred seems to think the ultimate product containing all that plumbing is the “Internet operating system”.

It’s close to the concept of a “web operating system” that Chris Messina and I were discussing recently, which was the conversation that prompted me to write about plumbing in the first place.