Here's what the rssCloud element looks like in this blog's RSS feed.

The tech story of last weekend was probably that WordPress installations around the world got hit by a nasty worm, so it was nice to see today that WordPress bounced back with an announcement that wordpress.com now supports rssCloud, a real-time update feature of  RSS developed by Dave Winer.  That was quickly followed by Joseph Scott’s release of an rssCloud plug-in for self-hosted WordPress installations.

Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb summarizes today’s news in a recent post, and in the process has a great analogy of why rssCloud matters:

“This is like the difference between checking your email every once in awhile and using a Blackberry to get new emails pushed to you as soon as they arrive. The subscription method of RSSCloud works more like Instant Messaging than the old method of polling feeds for updates each time you fire up your feed reader.”

I installed the rssCloud plug-in on the blog tonight, and it couldn’t have been easier.  I’m looking forward to see how fast RSS readers adopt this protocol as well as the impact it has on the “real-time web”.