“The Web browser itself is about to croak.” So declared Wired‘s Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf back in the spring of 1997. The authors’ Exhibit A was PointCast, a hugely hyped piece of software that streamed headlines, ads and other bits of information from the Internet across your computer screen. Whereas the web’s a “pull medium,” forcing you to go out and select pages to view in your browser, PointCast was a “push medium” that delivered information directly to you. But there was a problem with PointCast: It was annoying as hell. Millions of people installed it, and pretty much all of them uninstalled it in short order. Never mind croaking, the web browser didn’t even catch a cold.

So it is with considerable trepidation that I make my own big prediction: RSS is the killer protocol for push media. RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, makes it easy to extract chunks of text from web pages and feed them into a news reader installed on a PC, PDA or cell phone. (The news reader can be a standalone program or it can be built into a browser, an e-mail application, or an external web page.) You tell the news reader which feeds to subscribe to, how frequently to update them, and how to present the information it gathers. The feeds can be blog posts or wire-service headlines or magazine articles or book chapters or sports scores or product descriptions – you name it.

The great thing about RSS (or alternative formats like Atom) is that it’s a push medium that’s not at all pushy. You control what you read and when you read it. And it’s efficient. Glancing at a window in a news reader is much easier than jumping between web pages to see what’s new. The other big advantage for RSS is that the proliferation of blogs has created a vast reservoir of distinctive content to be turned into feeds. The Internet needs a simple, automated method for assembling and delivering information as it never has before.

If RSS does take off – and it’s already being used regularly by some 6 million Americans – it may pose the biggest challenge yet to the livelihoods of print publications, particularly newspapers. The news reader doesn’t just provide an online version of an existing publication, as many magazine and newspaper sites do; it introduces a whole new way of aggregating news and other information, controlled by readers and customized to their particular needs and fancies. In a sign of the growing interest in this new medium, it was reported this week that Google’s testing a method of delivering ads through RSS feeds. Traditional publishers are going to have to think hard about the consequences not only for their print editions but for their web sites as well. As for the old browser, it’s looking sprier than ever.