Of the three videos posted in the Week 1 folder, the one that surprised me most was the one about RSS feeds. They were the height of aggregation technology for years, but they have been rendered outdated by new forms of Web 2.0 media. There is a strong ironic streak when you realize that what killed the RSS might be the web content it worked to assemble.
At their height, RSS feeds were important because they gathered documents and traced their passage from writer to reader, from reader to reader, from media to reader, and so forth. This was key when web content was posted to typical websites--MSNBC for instance--that otherwise did not have a major Web 2.0 presence. Today, an MSNBC article always comes with Twitter, Facebook and other direct links to faster and more personalized data streams. The Facebook "trending news" sidebar has taken the place of the RSS feed when it comes to delivering major trends and stories.
RSS feeds do offer better customization options. It's much easier to tailor a feed to your interests than it is to narrow down a Facebook news stream. This, along with the lower popularity, might make an RSS feed a useful tool for a specific research project without clogging numerous Web 2.0 media at the same time with identical links.
Do you really find the technology obsolete? I feel like some tech companies have tried to render RSS obsolete (hello: Google; and let's not talk about how I cried when bloglines died), but what you note in your last paragraph is so true: it's very useful when you have specific items/sites you're trying to track. RSS feeds have made my research so much easier. I think they still have their niche. The key is that they work if you're following a specific target -- like the blogs in this class. If you're more interested in following a general news stream and/or getting recommendations, then the semantic web stuff starts to become of interest.
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