RSS started in 1997, when a man name David Winer developed the format. He called his product Scripting News.

Dan Libby, of Netscape, designed the first version of RSS, reportedly, based upon Winer’s work, to tool up Netscape for automatically adding news from other sites to the Netscape site.

There were a lot of changes in the first version of RSS - changes that included words such as Resource Description Framework (RDF) and XML.

In 1999 Winer, updated RSS as Version 0.91, (up from Version 0.90) to include more features and to make it simpler. The first thing Winer did was to get rid of the RDF format and made RSS a straight SML format.  And the RSS acronym now stood for “Rich Site Summary”--  then he stopped developing RSS.

As the story goes, users wanted to further develop RSS -- so late in 2000 a group of software developers developed RSS, Version 1.0

There were a lot of changes in the early stages of RSS and one of the major changes was when Dave Winer, developed RSS 2.0 in 2002.  He then decided that RSS should stand for “Really Simple Syndication”  Sam Rudy later came up with a Version called Atom, that is also based on XML structure.

Has all of these changes effected how RSS is view online today? Yes. But the good news is, the evolution of RSS is coming full circle and should settle into an International standard that we can all live with.

One thing is for sure, the guys over at RSS Ground have simplified RSS, at least enough for webmasters to be able to add a small code to any web site (HTML, PHP or JavaScript) and get news feeds and information based on keywords.  These feeds update automatically. Is there a cost? Yes. Is it expensive? No. $19.95 per month. Over 60,000 webmasters have signed up.  The question is, how are you doing? How’s your web traffic? Need reliable content?

Click on over to RSS Ground and see if membership will benefit you.