RSS pioneer Dave Winer comments on CNET’s Newsburst … Other news organizations should be thinking seriously about following suit, and upping the ante.

Imagine putting your best news, with links to pages with your ads on it, in the right column of a River of News style aggregator with all your competitors’ news on it (and weblogs of course, thank you). Now the readers no longer need to go to your competitors’ home pages, you’ve just given them an incentive to come to you to get news from them.

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Bottom-line: Aggregator software and the news business, looking forward, are very tightly bound. Every major media company is going to want to have an advantage in this area.

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I agree with Dave. This is the future of news consumption. The RSS revolution will force online news sites to evolve into aggregators to retain their eyeball base. We’re already seeing this with sites like Topix.net. But the big guys have a chance here to get into the RSS game.

The moves that CNET, the LA Times, the Guardian and the others that follow will have profound impact on PR. It will raise how clients perceive news placements on blogs because they will be on an equal playing field in the aggregator. We will look back on this week as a watershed moment for RSS. Good going CNET.

Steve Rubel is a PR strategist with nearly 16 years of public relations, marketing, journalism and communications experience. He currently serves as a Senior Vice President with Edelman, the largest independent global PR firm.

He authors the Micro Persuasion weblog, which tracks how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the public relations practice.