Remember Pointcast? It was great. The news came to you, rather than you having to find the news.

The problem was it was a bandwidth hog. If 1,000 people wanted Pointcast, every one of them needed to be updated every time a new story hit their preferences. Pointcast died in 2000.

Well, RSS newsreaders are the new Pointcast, and the pushback has begun.

Paul Festa's story has a really bad headline. This is not really about blogs per se. It's about RSS, specifically the newsreaders based on RSS that push blog entries to people based on their preferences.

Just like Pointcast.

Festa notes that Microsoft is getting so much RSS traffic it is cracking down on RSS use throughout its Microsoft Developer Network. He says this is the fault of blogs. That's wrong. It's the fault of RSS.

Whenever a story with the right keywords hits the RSS feed everyone who wants stories on those keywords gets it. (I'm guessing this is going to lots of places.) That provides a load on everyone's bandwidth, just as "push" technology and spam provide a bandwidth load.

When I go out to a blog, or any other Web site, to get a story, that's different. It's just me going. True, people can "rush to the rail" (and they do), as in the current Hurricane Ivan nyuck-nyuck. But the sites serving that news have business models to deal with the traffic. Click all you want, the Weather Channel makes money off you each and every time you do.

This isn't true for blogs fed off RSS. Readers strip out the ads. Often there aren't any ads.

Fortunately, as Contentious notes in the link that started this story, RSS isn't a company. Thus, there's no outfit that can go down due to RSS' bandwidth hogging -- it's just an enabling tool created by volunteers.

But it is a bandwidth hog. And eventually everyone will have to deal with that fact in their own way.