The folks at Yahoo continue to make strides in opening up RSS for the masses. Ross Fadner writes in MediaDailyNews that “Yahoo! has quietly made several key enhancements to its RSS offerings that industry analysts say mark the first big push to take the format mainstream.” This is wonderful news for those of us who’ve been pushing the technology for years and should be a wake-up call to the naysayers of the world. The term “RSS” seems to scare a lot of folks (because it’s too different), and Yahoo! is smart to stay away from an emphasis on the technology.

When users choose to add content to their My Yahoo! page, a link to RSS feeds is prominently displayed. Then, to receive a feed, users simply click an “add” button, instead of cutting and pasting the URLs of XML-coded Web pages. Feeds are continuously updated on the My Yahoo! page.

In fact, RSS is barely mentioned at all–Yahoo! simply refers to its RSS links as content feeds.

(Gartner Group Analyst Allen) Weiner noted that organizing the content in such a manner “opens up RSS, and makes the technology kind of invisible, so all you get is the benefit of it.” MessageCast’s (CEO Royal) Farros compared Yahoo!’s deployment of the technology to the way Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) effectively changed e-mail without most people realizing it. “It’s hard to make RSS sexy in the same way SMTP isn’t sexy. It’s an enabling technology,” he said.