"It takes a while before people realize they can do other things with a new medium."
Ramanathan V. Guha
Computer science is renowned for its use of confusing TLAs—Three Letter Abbreviations. Even in computing, however, RSS is notable for being a tricky example. During its history, RSS has stood for Rich Site Summary, RDF Site Summary, or Really Simple Syndication.
RSS is a way of describing websites, especially sites with fast-moving content such as news. The original RSS was created by Ramanathan V. Guha (b. 1965) in 1999, for the popular My.Netscape.Com site. The "portal" site enabled browsers to customize news on a single page. This was only possible because each of the different source websites agreed to publish a description of their news in Guha's common format.
Since then, RSS, which grew from Guha's earlier work at Apple's Advanced Technology Group, has been through several incarnations at the hands of many different organizations and people. Dave Winer, another podcast pioneer, added much to the standard, including the ability to handle audio files and other enclosures in RSS, paving the way for the arrival of podcasting in 2003.
Today RSS—currently standing for Really Simple Syndication—can gather news, blog entries, stock market prices, podcasts, pretty much anything in fact, into one place, often through the use of news reading software such as the popular Google Reader.
