The current RSS polling mechanism has been said to scale well because “its cost is almost directly propor- tional to the number of subscribers” [5]. In fact, linear cost is typically an indicator of poor scaling properties, especially when that cost is focused on one member of a distributed system. It is likely that the further growth of RSS adoption will be badly stunted, without substantial change to the way micronews is distributed. The proposed FeedTree subscription system for RSS takes advantage of the properties of peer-to-peer event notification to address the bandwidth problem suffered by Web content providers, while at the same time bring- ing micronews to end users even more.
