What is RSS?
April 1, 2008 – 7:00 am
It is very likely that you have at least heard of RSS, if from no other place than in my recent review of Google Reader. Well, in this primer we will dig down a bit and learn what RSS is capable of, and how its being used out there on the Internet.
Background
According to the RSS Advisory Board, RSS was first developed at Netscape, in 1999. Netscape was looking for a way to allow end users to build their own “channels” of information on Netscape’s Netcenter service. At this point, RSS stood for RDF Site Summary. This new format was built in a language specification called XML (extensible markup language) that is similar to HTML (HyperText Markup Language — the native language of web pages and web browsers). Both XML and HTML actually developed from SGML, which itself was descended from GML. GML was written in the 60s by three men (Goldfarb, Mosher and Lorie) who worked for IBM. Their goal with GML was to develop a language to describe how to mark up text in to sections, paragraphs, lists, etc.
Let’s get back to RSS. So, originally it was used by Netscape as a way to allow end-users to customize the information that they would see on certain web sites. The original concept was as a sort of clipping service — you could choose the content (sports, technology, science, etc.) and Netscape would build the page for you, dynamically pulling the RSS content and building a web-page with it. Sort of like a grand-daddy of of My Yahoo! or iGoogle.
Other people and companies started getting interested in this new language, such as Dave Winer who worked with UserLand Software. When Netscape was bought by AOL, they eventually dropped the use and support of their version of RSS, leaving others to pick up the reins and further develop the standard. They started calling this newer RSS spec Rich Site Summary. They eventually pushed the the format up to version .92, and even though a version 1.0 standard was released, it wasn’t in wide-spread use.
In 2002, after several more sub-1.0 revisions, Dave Winer released version 2.0 of RSS, now officially called Really Simple Syndication. This is the point where adoption of this language really started to pick up and more traditional web tools, such as browsers, started to add features that allowed them to “read” RSS XML data (feeds) as well.
A good history with citations can be found on Wikipedia.
But What is RSS?
RSS, very simply, is a structured method to retrieve content from server to client. Think of it this way: Let’s say every day you go to a web site, for example CNN, to check sports news. But what if it was a slow news day? You check in the morning, but there’s nothing really new. You check again a little later, but no joy. You can’t use a ‘watchdog’ program to tell you when the site has been updated because CNN is always putting new articles up, just nothing that interests you. This is where RSS is the solution. Since CNN offers all of its news conveniently pre-sorted into different categories such as sports, you can get a feed reader and ’subscribe’ to the CNN sports feed. Now, you don’t have to check. You keep your feed reader open and it checks for new content periodically. You can set it to alert you for certain key words or article types. This frees you up to be productive, especially if you check not just one site, but dozens.
A fancy white paper was released in 2004 extolling the potential explosive growth of RSS, if you want to read it. But I also found this very instructive (and, in my opinion, delightful) YouTube Video:
By the way, there are lots of videos that try to explain RSS on YouTube, if you are bored.
Ok, I Got the Basics, What Else Can RSS Do?
People are finding new uses for RSS all the time, actually. But one of the original uses, outside of syndication a news or blog feed, was to distribute podcasts. If you have an Apple iPod, you have probably heard a podcast, or at least, heard of a podcast. Simply, a podcast is a media file, like a recording or a video clip, that is created for people to watch. Originally, video and audio on the Internet was limited to sites that had the software necessary to stream the content to your browser, like CNN video or RealPlayer video.. remember RealPlayer?
But with the advent of RSS, people could record video and audio in a number of different free formats and then distribute those files out to their listeners/viewers for them to enjoy later, either on their PC, or iPod (or other portable device). RSS allowed fans to subscribe to the media feeds they enjoyed, like NPR or even, yes, CNN. Honestly, there are thousands of podcasts to choose from now. The iTunes Store is also a good place to look - their software is free, even if you don’t own an iPod and they have an extensive directory of podcasts that you can subscribe to and retrieve directly into the iTunes client.
The Future of RSS
This web site is all about social media and software. I really like the term convergence culture, which, if not coined by Henry Jenkins of the MIT media lab, he at least made it a buzzword and wrote a book with that title. Anyway, as a site tracking developments in social software, I can tell you it is obvious that nothing new gets built without some sort of RSS support out of the box.
RSS is becoming the new social fabric that is stretched on top of the internet. It cleanly separates content from code and, like an obsessive librarian, adds all sorts of useful tags to everything that is placed therein. Creation date. Type of media. Summary of contents. Related information. Even if you don’t care about 9 out of 10 of these tags, your feed reader does, and it can do all sorts of tricks once your feed has been retrieved. Sort by newest? Sure. Search for keyword? Ok. Combine all your feeds into one mega-feed? Absolutely!
Popular applications like Twitter, FriendFeed and even Google Mail (or gMail) are getting RSS-enabled. Yes, you can get all of your friends tweets via RSS. You can get all of your friends everything by RSS through FriendFeed. You can even get your EMAIL via RSS if you are using Google Mail.. they just added support for that.
I would hazard to say that a lot of the heavy lifting for this new generation of social media web sites is RSS. And even if some of those sites are using something else, RSS will be de facto supported going forward, of that you can be sure.
Tags: content, feed, Primer, reader, rss
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