Danny Ayers has come up with a very cool RSS Module proposal: Simple Semantics Resolution. This allows RSS 2.0 to support RDF (and all the cool semantic processing that enables) by simply including a reference to a XSL stylesheet in the RSS. Of course, then we’d need some end user tools that actually use some of the semantic features in RDF, but that might be a chicken & egg kind of problem. I’d love to hear what aggregators are using things like Dublin Core metadata for. As far as I can see dc:subject might be used by some, but that appears to be the extent of the usage.
Another Module I’m quite interested in is Easy News Topics from Paolo Valdermarin and Matt Mower. I need to do some more reading on their concept of a cloud, but I think what it would allow is automatic blog classification by sites (say… JavaBlogs using Classifier4J). Then if aggregators supported it it could allow filtering based on topics, as defined by a particular cloud.