Gwene is an RSS (and Atom, etc) to Usenet News (i. e., NNTP) gateway

Wow, this is something I wished for since the creation of RSS.

Somehow, the RSS design failed to provide features that were already there in NNTP, like differential updates and message/reply (post/comment) threading...

Here is a little video I made showing how to use Gnus in Emacs to read RSS via Gwene: http://vimeo.com/asjo/rss-in-emacs

Any reason to use this over the builtin `nnrss` backend?

Only that nntp is more mature than nnrss in Gnus, in my experience.

I only had nnrss working well when I used an external script to fetch the feeds via cron (there is an example in the documentation).

When Lars created Gwene, I switched to use that instead.

This is great. If you sign up for new feeds they will be available almost immediately. I'm using Gwene with mutt as my newsreader.

At least for now, this is my replacement for Google Reader. I've set up Emacs Gnus, subscribed to the half-dozen or so blogs that I care about, and now I read in the comfort Emacs.

This would be cool with an alt.rss-feed.DOMAIN-COM translator... could even be used as a backend for an up and coming web-rss platform.