I'm going to start a new podcast-only feed, and <a href="http://scripting.com/2024/06/23/howRssStartedTheRealStory.m4a">this will be first episode</a>. 14 minutes. It tells the story of RSS as a remarkable coming-together of tech, news, publishing and blogging. The first burst came from Netscape and four leading web pubs, Salon, Red Herring Wired and Motley Fool. As a leading blogger and developer of blogging tools, I jumped on board as soon as I heard of it, as did the people at Blogger. RSS was an instant standard with a great installed base, and retained its simplicity. You have no idea how remarkable that is. It grew like a weed. An installed base developed. There was confusion for a couple of years, between 2000 and 2002, about what RSS was, but the market stayed with the format specified by Netscape in 1999. Then in 2002, at UserLand we did a deal with the NY Times to get their news flowing through RSS, and in the next year, the <i>entire news world supported RSS.</i> That's the story. You can write all about who did what in a background story, but the big story, the miracle, mostly remains untold. What matters is an open format took root and retained its simplicity. And it pays to understand why it was not a strong enough foundation to be successful, first because the vendors didn't work with each other, and then because Twitter made subscription one click, where it was ridiculous how hard it was to subscribe to a feed in RSS. We should learn from this, and not repeat the same mistakes, and of course until the real story is out there, we can't learn from it. This is a 14-minute podcast. I cut off the last five minutes because I got lost in the weeds. All of this is documented in the archive of this blog and the sites it points to. And if there's interest I'll happily talk about it in a future podcast.