Readit NewsIf I'm feeling energetic and risky, I would evaluate the commercial viability of radioisotope batteries.
I'd love to explore how we could do more with this as well as I see so much value but like it has been pointed out here, RSS is set and forget for many people and therefore isn't in the majority of user's minds. Also the utility of having content in a feed is undervalued IMHO.
The only thing I'm not satisfied with reading news on RSS, is that news organizations push too many articles, to the point that reading the headlines alone takes quite some time. There's nearly 100 articles per day per source sometimes. Unlike a newspaper, which has a natural structure of priority and hierarchy, in an RSS reader, every head line has the same salience, and it's a pain to weed out what's important.
I kinda hope news organizations would make a separate "weekly digest feed", 30 or so articles per week.
This was a recruitment firm letting their subscribers pick the categories of jobs they receive in their newsletter. I think this is anything but spam. Cuts out the things they aren't interested in and makes sure they only receive jobs relevant to their search.
Other companies using the service are doing similar - sending relevant articles to subsets of their audience - not even for commercial purposes. We have educational institutes using the service for sending information to students.
Maybe it was the word automation that concerned you in this but I think done correctly it can be a big benefit for subscribers and content producers.