Another Damn Acronym: RSS

You see the little orange boxes labled ‘XML’ everywhere. Or maybe there is a cryptic link, such as the one at the bottom of this page, that reads ‘RSS’. This has to be one of the more widely confusing trends to hit the web in a while. It is actually not even clear what RSS stands for. RDF Site Summary? Really Simple Syndication? Or maybe it stands for Rich Site Summary.

Jason Fried posed an interesting challenge to the readers of Signal vs. Noise: “Explain RSS in 10 words or less…” My favorite response: “Yet another over-hyped internet technology that fails to deliver.” But the truth is, RSS is actually useful and is here to stay. Currently you must download a “news aggregator” to have headlines and story summaries come to you. I imagine future versions of browsers and email clients will have RSS functionality built in (and probably call it something less techie).

Soon RSS will expand its role. For example, when you subscribe to your favorite skate shop’s newsletter it will magically appear in the “RSS” area of Outlook or IE. The marketing people don’t have to constantly fight to get their newsletters past subscribers’ spam filters and the end-user will never receive the newsletter unless they actually subscribed to it.

Now if I can just figure out what the hell a pingback is.

April 2nd, 2004