Reintermediation, but in a good way?

I don’t know whether TechDirt is affiliated with Bloglines, but Mike gives a puff to Bloglines’s selfless attempt to reduce syndication bandwidth usage by caching the feeds itself.

It might be a reasonable approach to public feeds if the business model is right (and I would put up with a few ads along with my news). For private feeds it’s less of a problem because by their very nature the private feeds are less frequently used. However it would be a shame if two standards emerged: the only difference between public and private feeds should be the authentication.