Now once we have a single place for subscriptions, which is a real tall order, then all kinds of services can be built off that. It’s like the domain name system again, and perhaps that’s the way to implement it. We’re lucky that RSS is still a fairly close-knit community, and there is leadership that works, somewhat. The small tech companies and at least two of the large ones (Apple, Google) don’t participate, they blaze their own trails, but the publishing industry and most of the large tech companies are still in the mode of cooperating. So now may be a time it can work. And reading lists buy us some time.

Disagree. Simplicity only happens when subscription becomes brain-dead simple. I use a dozen or more RSS readers on any given week. The primarily mechanism for subscribing is cutting and pasting the RSS URI. Yes, there are subscription chicklets and auto-discovery, but I don’t remember the last time I clicked on a subscription chicklet or used auto-disco. The chicklets are usually missing from most blogs or the auto-discovery involves an additional toolbar.