Most forums don't have RSS feeds streaming out of them. This fact forces you to have to annoyingly browse back to the url and see IF there has been any updates. Or, you have to check your email for threads you've subscribed to. This means that all new posts with potentially relevant matter sits stale till you jump in.Converting a Forum into RSS solves all these issues. You will get updates in your RSS reader like Netvibes or Pageflakes as soon as there is a new topic of interest. Further, you can specifically ask for only the topics that match a keyword filter of your choice to push into your rss reader.
To Convert Forums into RSS, use http://Znitch.com. Znitch simply asks for the html page url, a optional keyword filter and an email address if you want an alert. Then, just click on the RSS logo to the left of your ZNITCH readout and VOILA!, you've got the xml rss feed url.
The Ubuntu forum already has a rss feed so it's not the perfect example BUT even in this case, you can extent and add filtering to the rss. In most forums, rss is not available so http://znitch.com is a clean solution for adding custom length filterable rss feeds.
