The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success, 3rd Edition

Back to the Beginning

The early RSS formats date back to 1995, when computer scientist Ramanathan V. Guha and several of his colleagues developed the Meta Content Framework (MCF)1 at Apple Computer’s Advanced Technology Group between 1995 and 1997. Dan Libby is responsible for improving the first RSS by incorporating Dave Winer’s “ScriptingNews” format, which he dubbed “Rich Site Summary” (see more on Winer next). Winer is a pioneer of RSS as Really Simple Syndication, and his Scripting News is one of the oldest blogs on the Internet, having been established in 1997.

Winer continued to develop and release improvements to his RSS project, the most significant of which came in 2000 when he introduced a version that could enclose audio files. This technology made the still-new process of podcasting (see Chapter 9, Talking about the Podcast (Audio Create)) much easier and more user-friendly. Then, in December 2001, RSS-DEV Working Group—which by now included Guha and O’Reilly Media—developed RSS 1.0. Winer released his newest major revision of his RSS—2.0—in 2002, which then took on the name Really Simple Syndication.

Atom was born out of this controversy in June 2003. Atom was a ground-up redesign of the RSS delivery system that was adopted by the IETF, or Internet Engineering Task Force, Proposed Standard RFC 4287 (see the following for more details about Atom’s creation and development). The Atom Syndication Format is similar to the RSS format and uses the Extensible Markup Language ...