I've been meaning to post something to this effect for a while, but it ended up as a comment to a post by Mike Linksvayer:

I've recently been working on a couple of projects designed to aggregate large quantities of information (mostly news posts) from websites in particular fields. These sites range in scale from single-author blogs to mutinational behemoths, and can be from anywhere in the world (admittedly with an English language bias).

What I'm dismayed to find, across all these sites, is that (at a rough approximation) only half of them have RSS (or Atom) feeds, never mind microformats, RDFa, or the Next Big Thing from Tantek Çelik. Instead there are the inevitable buttons linking to social media silos. I've seen things like a single image comprised of the usual logos representing "social media", including the RSS logo, but no RSS feed on the site, suggesting there are now professional web developers out there who don't even know what RSS is. There's a UK think tank with a site which, going by aesthetics, has been running in it's current form for many years, that links to "/RSS/file/goes/here.rss"; if anybody's noticed this TODO, they don't think it's important enough to fix.

If you follow Zeldman et al. it's easy to forget that the vast majority of web developers are ignorant, talentless hacks. Most (approximation again) of these non-syndicating sites are built on off-the-shelf CMSes which have either built-in or plug-in RSS/Atom functionality; it's just not switched on. I'm horrified to say so, but I think the first step in fixing the Web's "social" deficit is to have an awareness-raising campaign for a 15 year old XML document type: "RSS EVERYWHERE", "I WANT MY RSS", or something. Only then can we get more ambitious and start to argue that RSS isn't the last word.