According to Dave Winer Microsoft are thinking about RSS as a general list mechanism.

Dave's right. This is huge. I've always said RSS is the web equivalent to the Unix pipe.

Spend any time thinking about good old fashioned computer science. The stuff I never understood in college, and that they probably don't teach much these days. And what's it about? Batch processing of files. Reading characters from streams. Lexing and parsing programming languages. List processing.

This is the fundamental level of computing. Higher level abstractions that are built on top of it are often brittle : over-specialized.

When you need to return to flexibility, when you need to change, you fall back down to the fundamentals : lists, sequences, get the next symbol, transition to the next state, do something.