Watching the adoption of podcasts has made me think about RSS and text. Apple’s implementation for audio podcasts really is quite solid. I know a lot of people who love podcasts because of their iPod. iTunes is, in a lot of ways, the ideal tool for enjoying podcasts. It’s built into the same app that manages your portable device and your music already, making it trivial to get things organized and synchronized between devices. When the video podcasts come out (with the video ipod), I expect it to be even more compelling, especially among the subway/T riding crowd.

This got me to thinking, though, that simple RSS for text really doesn’t have the sexy integration that iTunes has. I don’t really know what’s missing or what might be better, but I want to toss out the idea that maybe we haven’t done the best we can with regular web content and RSS. Of course, it doesn’t help that the most popular aggregators like My Yahoo and Google don’t show anything but the headline.

For example, some podcasts (like ESPN’s) are a best of sort of thing, involving editorial decisions. Other successful podcasts, like the Battlestar Galactica podcasts) offer complete content that augments other content.

What’s the equivalent for text content? Would you syndicate the front page of a site? Do composite items? Standardize something like FeedDemon’s Newspaper feature?

I’m sure there’s something better… just don’t know what it is. All I know is that it’s going to be something simple.