The Origin of the Greatest Thing Nobody’s Using

Dave Winer: The Inventor of RSS (Courtesy of Joi / Flickr)

EverythingIsHistory.com provides two methods for subscribing to the articles on this site, RSS and email. The majority of the population is familiar with the latter, so let’s focus on the former. Depending on who you ask, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary. Basically, RSS allows you to view updates to a website by viewing them in what’s called a feed reader, RSS reader, or aggregator. For more info on my favorite RSS Readers, visit these links: Feed Reader (Windows), Google Reader (web-based), or Vienna (Mac OS X).

The origins of RSS go back to the scriptingNews format which was created in 1997 by Dave Winer, who most people refer to as the original blogger. Then, in what became a busy year for web syndication development, 1999, Netscape designed RSS 0.90 for use with its own my.netscape.com, although it also supported the scriptingNews format. Over the course of the summer, a team at Netscape and Mr. Winer went back and forth with the different versions of their respective formats before Netscape finally integrated the scriptingNews format and Winer, satisfied with the effort, adopted the new RSS (version 0.91). While Netscape abandoned developmet after the adoption of RSS 0.91, Winer continued to work on improving the RSS standard. However, a man by the name of Rael Dornfest released a competing standard, known as RSS 1.0, which was not compatible with the preceding versions of RSS developed by Netscape and Winer. Thankfully, Winer released RSS 2.0, which in actuality is RSS 0.92, but just named RSS 2.0 so as to completely shut RSS 1.0 out of the picture and eliminate confusion.

Although some form of syndication has been in place for roughly the last 12 years, the RSS adoption rate is only at 11%, which in all likelihood is do to the prevalence and ease of access of email. So why should you consider using RSS? Because by subscribing via RSS, you can keep up with your favorite sites all in one location, while also protecting your privacy by not sharing your email address through newsletter sign-ups (although you don’t have to worry about that with EverythingIsHistory.com). You are welcome to subscribe to EverythingIsHistory.com (on your right) through any means that is convenient to you, but I would like to know, what’s your take on RSS?

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