In a wide-reaching announcement Friday, June 24, Microsoft said it intends to build RSS into its Internet Explorer browser, and also to make it a core part of its upcoming operating system upgrade, code-named Longhorn. See the news.com article for more details.

RSS has proven itself an important technological component of the evolving online world. It's the engine behind the blog phenomenon, and is built into cutting-edge tools like FireFox. But its adoption and growth have been limited mostly to pioneering users willing to install and learn third-party tools. Microsoft's announcment will change all that. Going forward, RSS increasingly will be integrated into personal computers, becoming ubiquitious over the next few years.

The knowledge that RSS will be on every desktop will spur huge investment in content creation, and in applications that work with this soon-to-be universal standard. It appears RSS is here to stay.