Dave Taylor – a pioneer on the Internet – complains about the lack of innovation in the world of RSS, on his blog :

More and more, though, I’m recognizing how dissatisfied I am becoming with RSS and, in particular, with RSS readers. The promise of being able to assemble my own personal newspaper just isn’t being realized…

…(one) problem is with the RSS readers that can’t differentiate between an updated feed entry of an article you’ve already seen, an article that has had a typo fixed or other minor – oft trivial – correction, and a completely new article…

And, it’s not just defining problems.  Dave goes a step ahead and offers some interesting (and user-friendly) solutions too :

I want a user-adjustable setting where I can tweak how sensitive my RSS reader is to changes in previously seen entries. Imagine a slider where one side says "show me everything, even if it’s just a freshened feed of ancient articles" and the other side says "minimum new content required: 100%".

… even a simple interface idea of letting me specify how many columns of content I’d like in my ‘virtual newspaper’ is something I have yet to see…

… have highly sophisticated search results tightly integrated into the reader, and of course, have some sort of anti-duplicate-content settings too.

As someone who reads several feeds via Bloglines, daily, I couldn’t agree more.  As much as it’s helped me reduce the time needed to ferret out relevant information from multiple sites, RSS technology still has some distance to cover before it can be called a "matured" solution.  And, the space in which these technologies operate – the World Wide Web – is characteristic of a far higher rate of innovation than the one seen in RSS readers today.

Hope someone is listening…