What is RSS?
I’m sure there are companies out there that are just hearing the news now that Microsoft plans to integrate RSS heavily into Longhorn, and many companies will be going “What the heck is RSS”?
Because you know, Microsoft is so big and all that, companies really stand up and take notice when they do something. You can think of it like a 500 pound gorilla doing belly flops at their local watering hole.
500 pound Gorilla: “Wee….” [jumps off nearby tree]
A huge splash in the pool, a bit of a negative chain reaction of ripples in the water and then a calming effect after the ripples have died out…
Of course, there would be the ones that are already in the know in regard to this. They will perhaps start thinking about their very own internal RSS initiatives such as information sharing between employees.
Many newspapers including the the two major print news companies in Australia, Fairfax and News Corp already have RSS feeds available.
RSS isn’t actually very new, it’s been around for a number of years, but with the increase in popularity of blogs, the awareness factor of RSS has increased significantly. It’s easier to have a notification of an update to something on the web, than it is to go through a list of a couple of hundred different websites in hope of finding an updated item to read.
Anyway, back to the point, for anyone who finds this post hoping for a brief overview of what RSS is, check out this Wikipedia entry.
I don’t remember how I first found out about RSS, but i’m sure it was to do with something blog related. Might have been when someone showed off a screenshot of an early version of FeedReader a few years ago. Either that, or it was around the time that I installed b2/cafelog for the first time which was in 2002.