Will RSS Readers Clog the Web?

As RSS grows in popularity and adoption, with speed and dimensions much beyond what the mainstream news report, skeptics and novices start to ask the same questions that they posed ten years ago, as the Internet was just bursting on the public scene. "News aggregators may be the best new tools to appear on the Web since the browser, but as the programs and the underlying RSS standard grow more popular, some question whether the Internet will be able to handle the traffic. Aggregators, sometimes called newsreaders or RSS readers, are a hybrid of a Web browser and an e-mail program, allowing Web users to peruse hundreds of information sources, from Boston-based restaurant job listings to Taiwanese political blogs. The beauty of an aggregator is that it displays articles from hundreds of websites in one place, so the user doesn't have to pull up the sites individually. But some are wondering: What happens when everyone discovers the power of aggregators? Will the Web be able to handle it? In Internet boom-speak, will it scale? Some think a solution to the problem might be found by integrating desktop applications into a peer-to-peer network, which would distribute the load among hundreds of clients. A central server would coordinate various readers, allowing some to check the original source of the information and passing on new information. Instead of 100,000 aggregators tapping CNN's website hourly, only a handful would, passing headlines to other aggregators." Of course, some of the above does apply, but you will see these and other issues soon to addressed by new solutions and smart technologies. Relax, RSS is here to scale.