Another enormous challenge is discovery and curation. How exactly do you find good RSS feeds? Once you have found them, how do you group and prune them over time to maximize signal?

This is the weirdest article on RSS I've ever read. Dead? Hardly. Dead means *gone*. RSS has never been gone. Twitter and other social channels have the significant problem of meta-posts during crises, signal obscured by increasing noise, making it impossible to follow breaking stories. RSS, you can clear the hash fast and drill right down to the info. Has he ever actually USED an aggregator? And dear God, he wants to *brand* RSS feeds. That's the whole beauty. All signal, no noise. I used to curate over 1000 unfocused feeds, which I wisely chivvied down to 370 tightly focused ones (though I'm adding more at the moment, trying to range away from politics). I have no problems curating and culling, either in Newsblur or Reeder. Never had problems in NetNewsWire, either. You can categorize in Newsblur, and most news orgs allow you to use niche-focus RSS feeds, so you don't have to parse their firehoses. I get RSS subscriber stats in *Squarespace*, even. Any inaccuracies in subscriber counts are the fault of cloud services, as I understand it - not RSS itself.

Really, TC. Where did you find this guy?

Later: Speaking of which, Anil had a bizarre tweet the other day, making it sound like the death of Google Reader threw people over to Facebook - if I understand his tweet properly. Anil is always dead-on, so this confused me. Just before Reader croaked, I asked compadres what I should switch to, and chose Newsblur. Exported my OPML from Google, imported into Newsblur, and didn't miss a beat. If some "media maker" people lost their access to RSS aggregation, I wonder about their ability to perform their jobs creditably. Sure, we had to pony up, but that's the way of the world these days. The cost is a pittance. And no, Facebook is NOT a replacement for RSS. It's not even a replacement for AOL (HAH). Twitter is not a replacement for RSS either, though news orgs are prioritizing their Tweets over RSS update frequencies (waiting for full articles or paragraphs to be written/edited/approved), so for immediacy during crises, it's good to check both Twitter and RSS interchangeably ... at least until the Twitter noise obscures any discernible facts.