"RSS is Plumbing"

This is what we're talking about! Until you never have to worry about whether a website you want to track has an RSS (or Atom, etc) feed, RSS is going to be a stumbling block for most of us.

Brad Feld says it nicely here.

One option is to wait until every website provides an RSS feed (hint: you'll be waiting a long time). The other option is to use Blogarithm.