I can think of a dozen things that couldn't actually be done with it, which could actually be done by just including them in the body of the item. Remember, as your link fragment says, it's a subElementOfChannel: you get one for your whole feed. Commenting on the whole feed, in a single single-line text input? Is My Feed Hot Or Not, based on whatever entry you happen to be looking at now? It was sort of useful in its day, which was in 1999 in My.Netscape, when you were looking at three HTML tips and wanted to search for "frameset" to see if they had an article on them, because who knew if they were indexed by AltaVista or HotBot or whether the article was only a month old, so it wouldn't be in any search engine, or, when (as we actually did back then), you would give some company with an interesting article or two your email address because you wanted them to send you email. Now? Dunno. I used to have a "Search me" textInput in my feed, but I couldn't find a single consumer that was using it, so I took it out.