The latest Newsweek had the cover story, Putting the ‘We’ in Web. It was a good enough story as these things go, probably pretty informative for people who didn’t know much about Web 2.0, though a bit basic for those who work with it.

The problem is that, although they talked in a seven page article about MySpace, Dabble, Craigslist, Flickr and others, they mentioned RSS only once, briefly.

RSS lets you “subscribe” to targeted information from a Web service in the way you subscribe to magazines.

They don’t deal with the implications of RSS, just shunt quickly into APIs. The one thing all of these companies have in common is that they generate feeds. It’s interesting enough I suppose that you can see and use free photos on Flickr, but the real ground-breaking going on here is the ability to govern information, to bring it together into one place, in one interface, based on what you find important and useful.

Feeds are starting to gain real ground. It’s not just blogs that offer them, not even just other media like the New York Times. They are used in most of these new services and technologies. They allow the user to leave off the puttering around and cherry picking that a “post-scarcity world” of information requires.

Every product created by Sproutit, starting with Mailroom, has a feed. Soon, all of a companies business will be doable, or at least surveyable, within a feed reader.

That’s the real story.