I'm getting the feeling that webfeed aggregation is in for a big hype bubble this upcoming year. Vacuous buzzphrases like "the network is the blog" and "personalized information hypermarkets" are starting to get traction. Besides there's now a conference providing, "awareness, clarity, education, deal-making and strategic business opportunities surrounding the emergence of online media syndication".
Uh, yeah.
In the short run, webfeeds are creating more problems then they solve. First is the firehose effect. Frankly, current aggregators suck at ameliorating this problem. They're all a step backwards from Outlook or even a good USENET reader. Second, given that standard syndication formats make media more amenable to machine manipulation on the end user's behalf, advertising becomes severely threatened. Makes the monetization issue that much tougher. Not mention branding gets whacked with webfeed aggregators. Last but not least is the continued thrashing about regarding bandwidth issues. Currently aggregation can be seen as something of a screw for both publishers and readers.
Of course, during the upcoming chaos a few prospectors, and their suppliers, will get quite rich. However it will take a while for the real transformative value to emerge, sprinklings of the magic "social network" dust notwithstanding.