The news of Barak Obama’s election victory, inevitable as it has seemed for weeks, if not for months, has barely sunk in. Commentators as diverse as George Bush and The Reverend Jessie Jackson are agreed about one thing - Americans (and I am now one) should be proud of themselves for electing an African-American as leader of the USA. It is historical. It is a proud moment for the people of the USA and shows they are looking to the future with optimism, not the past with cynicism.

But the significance of Obama’s victory goes far beyond what it means for the position of African-Americans in society, or for what it means for the rest of American society, significant as those things are. His victory brings to an end an era that began with Ronald Reagan, remained largely unchanged during the Bush senior and Clinton years, and has been relied on entirely under George W Bush. That is an era in which fear of internal and external enemies, or of cultural difference dominated the political discourse and atomized and paralyzed the American electorate. These were the years in which there was thought to be a Conservative majority, albeit a silent one. An era in which big bold optimistic ideas were frowned upon. An era in which the population as a whole was given the role of passive agent, living our lives, safe in the knowledge that we were protected by an all-powerful government.

America has been re-booted, with a new operating system. The past was a PC, Obama is a Mac. He is clever, attractive, well put together, desirable, optimistic, and many other good things. Above all else he is wanted - by Americans, by foreigners, by the world as a whole it seems. And he has unleashed and become a focus for the power of the people. Americans now officially care and are prepared to put their money where their mouth is. Optimism is Wired - Fear is Tired.

Obama’s movement has unleashed a bottoms up openness. The People can no longer be seen as a passive, fear-focused, manageable mob whose only job is to show up to vote every 4 years for the fear-monger in chief. The future will not look like the past. It will be better. There will be more thinking, more doing, more optimism and more real politics.

So… before I get too carried away I will end this piece by saying - YES! What a great feeling this is! At last we have an operating system that won’t keep crashing. It looks good. It feels good. I want it. And better still, it is crowd sourced!

Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion responds that :

“..while feed adoption may have crested the idea of online opt-in communications is just getting going. The Facebook newsfeed, Twitter and Friendfeed are perfect examples of opt-in vehichles that bring content you care about to you. In each case, you’re total in control. You can unsubscribe from individuals or groups and tailor the stream so that what you want finds you.”

Whilst Steve is right about the adoption of technologies like Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook, that really misses the point about RSS.

RSS is simply a form of XML, designed for allowing applications to syndicate, and others to aggregate. It is not a “consumer application. It is an enabling technology for consumer applications.

Somebody who reads a classified ad on Oodle.com is doing so because, in the background, RSS is being used to get the Ad from its source, onto Oodle. If you read the same ad on one of Oodle’s network partners like Yell, it may have gotten there via an RSS feed. Similarly, a Techmeme article arrives, partly due to RSS.

In other words, RSS is widely adopted and makes possible a wide range of applications that rely on aggregation (inbound data) or syndication (outbound data). Is the movement of data around the network, by applications, using RSS, going to stall. I don’t think so. Are the number of consumers who see data on the web, data that is only there because of the existence of RSS, going to grow? Hell yes!

It feels like Forrester may have been asking the wrong question. Not, how many consumers want RSS? But, how many Internet users want applications that can save them browsing and discovery time by aggregating their preferred content into one or more places? The former may stall (although I doubt that is true) but the latter will certainly not.

Having said that, the report does have a point. Giving consumers places to read about their passions, drawing on the work of many, via aggregation, has to be a priority for Internet publishers. But just as high a priority is hiding the complexities that go along with today’s “blog readers” and simply giving people the content they want. No argument there.