Tim Bray (one of the XML inventors), riffs on the business potential of RSS. In essence, RSS holds promise of becoming the defacto event notification format for business information. Win-win all around.
The peril is the rather confused, unprofessional state of RSS "standardization". The entire sordid mess has been well documented elsewhere, but he's partially right. RSS direction is fragmented. However, at this point I don't I'm not actually sure it's work freezing in a standardization process. The only thing RSS has really been used for is weblog change information. More field experience may be required, for these new applications.