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Gartner Group has described the history of RSS as a “case study in unintended consequences”, a classic example of a technology developed for a limited purpose which turned out to be exactly what a lot of people were looking for. It’s a complicated history, which has resulted in a dog’s breakfast of standards and implementations. A great deal of duplicated effort has resulted from splits following disagreements about the direction the versions were taking. It’s been picked up and dropped by various influential organisations. Now that Microsoft has adopted it and RSS has entered the mainstream, we can expect to see consolidation, and the withering away of competing versions and products (though not necessarily the worst ones). The various proponents haven’t even been able to agree on what the acronym stands for. Most say Really Simple Syndication, although some still insist on Rich Site Summary. Controversially, Microsoft has decided to resolve the matter by renaming it “webfeeds”, and Google calls its RSS feeds “webclips”. There are different versions of the history of the product, and the following summary is bound to upset somebody. (An accurate and balanced summary would have something to upset everybody.) RSS began as a Netscape project to create a format for building portals for news sites. The first version, .90, was thought to be unnecessarily complex. Version .91 was simpler, but by that time Netscape had other fish to fry, and let it go. It was picked up by a would-be vendor of blogging and other web-authoring products, UserLand Software. But a group of true believers in the original concept of RSS formed a breakaway standard, based on RDF, which they called RSS 1.0. The UserLand numbering therefore had to leapfrog to RSS 2.0 - under the new management of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. To the uninformed, version 2.0 would logically appear to be the successor to version 1.0, when in fact it was a different “standard”. RSS 3.0 is starting to come out, based on RSS 2.0. Meanwhile, Atom emerged, a product with a similar purpose, but a different structure. Atom was adopted by Google in preference to RSS, although they’ve now started to support RSS as well. Most people are agreed on what RSS is and does. IBM calls it “an XML-based format for syndicated content”. The RSS 3.0 website explains, “it is a way to broadcast online content's metadata via the Internet, thus letting webmasters inform users who read the RSS feed of changes in their site (updates, news, new links etc.) or inform applications of changes in a service”. It’s also been called “a mini database containing headlines and descriptions of what's new on your site”. A contributor to O’Reilly.com has described RSS as “the most widely deployed Web service across the Internet”. From the content originator’s point of view, it’s “a free and easy way to promote a site and its content without the need to advertise or create complicated content sharing partnerships”. Bloggers, news services and even podcasters use it to notify their audience of new content. It’s easy enough to get hold of an RSS aggregator - there are many available - and set it up so that instead of having to visit all the sites you rely on to see if there’s anything new, the RSS feeds automatically bring the relevant content to you. Microsoft has pledged to support all forms of RSS in Internet Explorer 7 and the forthcoming Vista operating system, including the .9x standards, which are still widely used, as well as 1.0 and 2.0. Atom support is promised for a later release. Microsoft has also said it will rationalise and extend RSS to make it more effective, easier to use and suitable for a wider range of applications, by for example adding support for ordered lists. Given the company’s history of “embracing, extending, and extinguishing” previous open public products, not everybody is happy with this prospect, but the company pleads it has no such intentions with RSS. Many people with no axe to grind for Microsoft will be happy to see the mess sorted out. Microsoft will undoubtedly put itself in the preselected RSS feeds in IE7, which may cause trouble similar to the browser wars, and other instances where the company has taken advantage of its ubiquity on the desktop to privilege its own products and services. But despite the excitement, there’s a long way to go before RSS becomes universal. Nielsen//NetRatings has found that just 11 percent of blog readers use RSS to sort through new content. Only five percent use feed aggregation software, and six percent use a feed aggregating website to monitor RSS feeds from blogs. 23 percent understood RSS but did not use it, while 66 percent either did not understand the technology or had never heard of it. Jon Gibs, Nielsen//NetRatings’ senior research manager, thinks there’s huge untapped commercial potential. "RSS feeds deliver relevant posts quickly, in a customisable, easy to manage format. These types of services provide marketers with an additional avenue to tap a captive audience for time-critical of fers. Since the customers themselves pick the content they will receive, advertisers are able to deliver their message within a context they know will engage their target audience." Once RSS is embedded it the desktop, it no longer matters whether people have heard of it, or what they call it. Webfeeds, anybody? Nick Langley Aug 30, 2005 Email this article Printer friendly page Previous Page
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