For those interested in the underlying plumbing of this site, today I added the RSS Cloud plugin for WordPress to this site that is described in more detail in this post: “RSSCloud for WordPress”

What does this mean for you as readers?

In the short term, not much.  The only RSS Cloud-enabled reader right now is Dave Winer’s River2.

However, both RSS Cloud and PubSubHubbub are moving us closer to a “realtime” web where you as a reader can “subscribe” to feeds and receive updates as soon as those feeds are updated.  Currently, when you “subscribe” to our RSS feed, you only see updates when your news reader polls the feeds to which you are subscribed.  Given that a good number of feeds may not have changed since the last polling interval this process is also quite a waste of packets.

So the idea is to move from a “polling” paradigm to one of “subscribe/notify”.  Much more will be happening in this space in the time ahead.  In the meantime, if you do use River2 or any of the other readers that may support the RSSCloud tag, you’ll be able to interact with the Voice of VoIPSA blog in that model.

P.S. Yes, I’m also working to add the PubSubHubbub plugin for WordPress to this blog, but I’ve run into a technical issue I’m trying to debug.