Distributed Epinions
This posting from Davic Galbraith touches on another emerging trend in RSS ... moving beyond publishing just "text items". RSS 2.0 has support for namespaces, and RSS 1.0 has modules, but they're both trying to capture the same thing: the ability to extend RSS to capture data (and meta-data) about disparate types without breaking what's great about RSS to begin with: the standardization of the base syndication format. Yes, that was a sentence with two colons in it. Sorry about that.
Once a community can agree upon the accepted namespace extensions to represent the desired content, all sorts of great things can happen. In this case, the community has to include both the feed publishers and (at this point non-existent) extension-aware client. At this stage, I think the key is to not over-engineer things ... you don't have to have some dublin core-esque schema to realize value in constrained domains. Just be good about versioning your schemas!