AOL will soon update its software to version 9 Optimized. Washington Post continues that there will be three ways to update: form, telephone and IM. Certainly the number of bloggers will expand quickly - just in time for the US Presidential primaries.

Some bloggers are speculating that it is the end of the Golden Age. So long as people are hitting AOL servers for RSS feeds, I don't think it is the end of the Golden Age. (If you haven't been involved with AOL servers, know that both the caching of web sites and email servers have been the subject of many technical articles over the years.) But if AOL finds that they need to change the RSS updating rules, then we have a different story.