Many people are making predictions for the coming year and general consensus is that this will be the year that RSS becomes widely adopted.

USA Today’s Kevin Maney asked people throughout the tech industry for predictions. His summary of those predictions includes:

RSS will become the biggest thing since …
The Web browser? Beanie Babies? Salt? Hard to say yet. But there is no shortage of effusiveness about Real Simple Syndication, or RSS — software code used to deliver news stories, blogs and other items via the Internet to your computer screen…The prediction is that RSS will become the primary way everyone accesses stuff on the Web.

Online Media Daily’s Jason Heller and Paul DeBraccio:

With the upcoming release of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 and Microsoft Live, the vast majority of consumers will have an RSS reader for the very first time.

Last but not least, the one of the creators of RSS, Dave Winer, includes in his ‘06 predictions:

RSS will continue on the growth vector it has been on for the last six years…More and more RSS will be seen as an advertising medium in itself, like catalogs, newsletters and fact sheets; and less as an advertising-supported medium.

What’s the lesson from these predictions?  The coming year will be one in which you and your team will need to have an advanced grasp of using RSS for both inbound and outbound communication in order to have a competitive advantage in a market inundated with basic use of the medium.