I keep reading this post by Rex Hammock and each time I do it seems smarter and smarter to me. Hammock’s basic premise is that while countless apps and services get headlines for their attempts at a perfect algorithmic news recommendation service, RSS has been the perfect news delivery tool for years and years now. Here’s the nut graf:

There is a technology that allows people to personalize and customize a flow of news that’s been around since the Mesozoic era of the web. It’s called RSS and is an often misinterpreted part of the infrastructure of the web that enables us to access content as a real-time flow of news, audio, video, etc.

I’ve long been a fan of RSS. Indeed I practically live inside of not email, but the two separate RSS accounts I have going right now, a Digg Reader setup for personal/industry reading and a Feedly account that’s primarily for client-specific news monitoring. I check them just as frequently as I do email and they are even more useful to my daily routine than email is on a number of levels.

But despite tools like MyYahoo and others in the past, RSS has always been a mystery for the general public because, as Tom Biro pointed out years ago, it was the one button on the internet that didn’t immediately do something when you clicked on it. Instead you had to copy the link, paste it somewhere else, and otherwise go through a whole procedure in order to make it work. Once you did, though, it was a “set it and forget it” situation, where once you’ve subscribed you’re all set and the feed will work just like you want it to.

Now, though, you have tools like Flipboard that take that RSS feed and hide it behind a more user-friendly experience. That’s fine since RSS has always been closer to the plumbing of the internet than anything that was a district user experience. That’s why you needed the reader, to give that ugly batch of XML code a pretty face.

As I said back when Google Reader was being shut down. I gave Google – and now Digg and Feedly – incredible information on which to judge my interests, both personal and professional, through what feeds I subscribe to. This is my entire reading list right here. Forget what’s “hot” or “popular,” ads and related feeds targeted to me based on my RSS reading list would be incredibly relevant. But that information was, and is being, squandered because everyone keeps thinking there’s a better way to make recommendations based on something other than the clear signals I’ve provided.