RSS began life at Netscape as part of the My Netscape project. It was given the name RDF Site Summary (RSS) because it was an application of the Resource Description Framework (RDF), a sophisticated language for describing resources on the Web. Netscape used RSS to describe news stories and to allow users to build their own information portal, called My Netscape, by selecting the news sources they wanted to have displayed in their personal portal. RSS caught on quickly, as web sites scrambled to provide news feeds compatible with Netscape's innovative new portal.
By the time Netscape developer Dan Libby produced the first specification, RSS 0.9, in January 1999, the RSS user community was already starting to divide into two camps. One camp wanted Netscape to make better use of RDF in RSS, and the other wanted to simplify RSS by removing RDF altogether. Influential blogger Dave Winer of Userland Software was among those arguing for simplicity and the removal of RDF.
When Netscape released the RSS 0.91 specification, all references to RDF were removed. Since RDF was no longer part of the specification, the acronym RSS no longer made sense. Dave Winer declared, "There is no consensus on what RSS stands for, so it's not an acronym, it's a name." It was around this time that he started his stewardship of RSS.
In July 2000, Dave Winer released his own version of the RSS 0.91 specification. He reformatted the document to make it shorter and easier to read. He also removed the specification's document type definition (DTD), making it more difficult for XML parsers to validate RSS news feeds.
RSS 0.91 is still in use today and is the oldest ancestor of RSS 2.0, which is currently the most widely used news feed format.
RSS - A Force To Reckon With:
RSS is a computer language format for syndicating news, content, video, media, mp3, podcasts, and advertising on the web. This includes syndicated content from major news sites such as Google, Wired, news-oriented community sites like Digg.com, and personal weblogs. But it is not just for news. Virtually anything that can be broken down into discrete items can be syndicated via RSS. This includes audio or video media (podcasting and videocasting), television shows through sites like Democracy Tv,
and YouTube.com.
One can even use RSS to track Hot Deals at sites like Buy.com or Ebay.
fwicki - A Tool For Leveraging RSS Technology:
Once information about each item is in RSS format, an RSS-aware program like fwicki can check the feed for changes and react to the changes in an appropriate way. These RSS-aware programs called news aggregators are popular in the weblogging community. Many weblogs make content available in RSS. fwicki is a powerful suite of RSS management tools that can help you streamline your aggregator (reader), create proprietary content RSS feeds (mashups), create personalized RSS news portals, and distribute your feeds. fwicki also offers innovative advertising opportunities for tech-savvy businesses and site owners.
With fwicki you can combine several feeds and create your own personal news stream using our two-step wizard.. or you can manually generate a special feed recipe from within our user area with the rss mashup engine. fwicki takes the process much farther by allowing users to create customized interactive data portals which become targeted, dynamic, central locations on the web where users get topic-specific information, media, and service access.
