Caught a presentation from Salim Ismail of PubSub last week at BDI's blogging confab in NYC. His thoughts on prospective searches through the company's indexing of millions of RSS feeds are provocative, and show one compelling direction that things may move in the next few years. Audio of Salim's talk is here (he starts at the 1:35 mark or so).

"We think we're on the edge of a total paradigm shift on the internet, and blogging is just the tip of the iceberg of that," Ismail says, explaining that he sees the web evolving from gen 1's messaging mode (email), to gen 2's request for response (http, so still prevalent) to the coming gen 3 -- publish and subscribe.

If you've spent any time using the new breed of RSS-based search tools, it's hard to disagree. Services like pubsub, feedster and technorati will explode over the next few years, allowing web surfers to essentially search in advance and receive notice every time their company, topic or band name gets mentioned. Will those mentions occur on blogs? Hard to say.

(My answer to the fad question: Keep your old blogs around, they'll be worth a fortune on ebay someday.)