Sandi, our friendly neighbourhood IE guru posted up to her blog on Sunday about the announcement that IE 7.0 will include RSS support. Personally I’m not surprised about the RSS feeds in IE, but I am really happy to hear that they are baking support right into the platform for the Longhorn release.

With that infrastructure in place teams like Office are in a great position to start leveraging a new data source – the challenge for the teams at Microsoft is going to be having enough imagination all the places you can put it.

Enclosure support is obviously pretty key here, and it’ll make some applications like iPodder or Doppler redundant for things like Podcasts because you’ll be able to open up Windows Media Player and have it display a list of “unread podcasts”.

I also expect to see quite a few data-mining applications hook into this and I wonder what the notification story is going to be – will the platform natively support pop-up toast from RSS items arriving? We won’t have to wait long to find out