I remember back the late 90's when these formats were being created (I was involved with cdf's inception) and while I'm sorry this woman has been disrupted with mountain lion's removal of rss from the mail app, I disagree with you on the claim that rss is anything like usenet. Rss is, like cdf, a content delivery format which is just a simple agreed upon set of XML tags for title, snippet and so on. If rss had discussion or comment capability, it might be reasonably compared to usenet, but rss has nothing in common with usenet as it stands, it's a one-way protocol, I subscribe, or I publish, there's no discussion, as there is with usenet. In that it's open, with no single gatekeeper, it is no different to http, but comparing rss to http would also be pointless.