Search Engines and RSS - Can They Compete?

An interesting commentary today from particletree on the importance of RSS. The author makes an interesting point:

"n RSS feed is a blog distilled to its core essence. If you look at the output of an RSS feed in a reader, you’ll see no comments, no trackbacks and (for the most part) no design. It’s the better blog. It’s pure data.If RSS is getting face-time at the expense of search, Google has something to worry about. And it makes sense. From personal experience, I know my daily routine to keep up with the information overload doesn’t really involve searching anymore, but subscribing."

Ever since I found out about services such as del.icio.us and Bloglines, I've been an RSS addict. I get all my feeds and social bookmarks for the day in one place, rather than poking around for them in search engines. Mind you, I'm not downplaying search engines. I don't think they're going anywhere. But I think that RSS will give them a run for their money, literally. Check out your Web Search Guide's various public access feeds:

• My Del.icio.us bookmarks
• My Bloglines feeds.
• Did you know that you can add this site to your RSS feeds? The easiest thing to do is to go to my Web Search Stay Up To Date Page. Easy to set up your RSS subscription here, whether you're a Yahoo, Bloglines, or NewsGator user.
• If you're using Firefox, you'll see at the bottom right-hand corner a little orange square. Click on it, and websearch.about.com will be added to your list of live bookmarks.
• Got a Bloglines account? Go to the Subscribe section and just enter in the URL (address) of this page. Easiest thing is to just cut and paste.
• For del.icio.us, set up your account and then start tagging away. More to come on both of these services in a new article(s) this upcoming week.