I probably knew about this before, but knowing about it and actually taking an nntp//rss aggregator for a spin are very different propositions. I can tell you how RSS being rebundled as Usenet can help save bandwidth by sharing feeds and pushing loads out to the network edges, or how even personal aggregators might obey all the proper rules to help spare blogs from drowning in their own feed serving.

But that's just talk. What you really need to do is tune your best most favourite Usenet newsreader to port 119 on demo.methodizesolutions.com, download their demo list of pop-blog pseudo-groups, and then find out first hand why the world doesn't need any fancy desktop RSS aggregators ... because we already have them.

Usenet Reborn

And it makes sense: Usenet was designed to solve the load problems of email mailing lists by mediating redundant one-to-many buck-shot message transports through creating shared proxy cachings for local area network patterns of one to a few and from those out to the subscribing many. As with Usenet or even HTTP proxy caching, each ISP caches only the subset of groups requested by their subscribers, perhaps adding their own internal feeds --- in so doing, they reduce the bitstream demands on the originating server so instead of 200 DSISP customers each taking the entire feedster feed only to read 3 items each, the one ISP-hosted (or community hosted e.g. Userland) caching edge server proxies the fetch as a peudo-Usenet group, redistributing it for their other 199 customers until the source flips on the Conditional-GET.

Blogs cut their bandwidth strains, readers get easy access over mature well-known tools, ISPs have a perk to draw customers --- Everybody wins. What's more, the content is by-definition time-sensitive (everyone wants only today's content) and, leveraging the existing technologies, there's additional opportunities for extra-blogular commentary purely over the NNTP (also blogdex link count or other reader rating metrics, technorati cosmos cross-refs and other semi-auto meta-data) and, at no extra cost, we'd gain the associated comment-spam protectorate of the NoCEm services.

Hmmm .... perhaps no accident the common parlance calls the feed aggregators as simply 'newsreaders' --- and maybe a future nntp/rss bridge software might include the smarts to crawl downloaded pages and thread comments and fold in trackbacks as cross-posts?