RSS has never been the sexiest of technologies, but a some new technologies may be about to change that. To date, virtually all of the action around RSS has been centered on generating RSS/ATOM "feeds" and providing readers that aggregate RSS content. However, a number of companies have recently introduced a variety of widgets and tools that will make is easier for companies leverage RSS (and other web 2.0 tools) as a way to monitor what their customers are saying, what their competitors are doing, trends in the market and even what is being said internally within an organization.

With a wide breadth of content now published in one feed or another, organizations have the opportunity to monitor the conversation like never before using simple tools like Grazr, which has introduced several interesting tools for designing and creating widgets that aggregate interesting content into a "reading list." The reading list can then be easily shared with others.

(By the way, if you’re still baffled by the whole RSS thing, check out RSS In Plain English for a quick primer.)