Bill Gates on RSS

Several blogs ([1] [2] [3]) are reporting on comments made by Bill Gates today about RSS. You can read the speech, but he's basically saying that the publish-subscribe nature of RSS is a convenient way to provide information, a nice compromise between manually reading web pages to see if they've changed since the last time you visited and sending out potentially distracting and disruptive e-mails to mailing lists.

The last sentence in the RSS section of his speech is interesting.

The ultimate idea is that you should get the information you want when you want it, and we're progressively getting better and better at that by watching your behavior, ranking things in different ways.

He's no longer talking about RSS here. He's talking about personalization. Learning from your behavior, the system should get you the information you want when you want it. The real problem is prioritizing and filtering information, not accessing information.