There’s an interesting article going on over at Kuro5hin on current RSS problems and possible solutions:
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a web content syndication format based on XML 1.0. In the current implementation it’s a very capable format used to aggregate content from multiple news sources. The problem with this format is that the architecture on which it is deployed hasn’t changed in a while and places too much load onto the infrastructure. (e.g. Joel’s RSS problem)
In this article I try to point out different approaches to solve these problems and make RSS more suited to be used on mobile devices which are not always-on.
Charles Miller chimed in with all kinds of goodies including mod_gzip, NNTP advantages/disadvantages, server-level caching, and the Jabber possibilites.