This post is the first in a short series exploring my hypothesis of RSS as the technological foundation of Web 2.0 for my PhD research. I have had the honor of talking with Dave Winer about my research and to pose him some questions. I would like to thank him for his time, thoughts and provoking new ideas for my dissertation.

The terminology of RSS

Naming conventions of formats, protocols and standards by Microsoft and Netscape show how they perceive the web. When Microsoft named its Channel Definition Format (CDF) it illustrated how Microsoft thought of the web as a static thing that could be defined through and fixed in Channels. The <channel> element nomenclature by Netscape is still visible in the RSS protocol.

Netscape originally named its “channel description framework for their My Netscape Network (MNN) portal”¹ RDF Site Summary (RSS) reflecting similar ideas transposed onto the web as something that can be fixed and summarized. RDF was “Netscape’s way of thinking static.”² It was later renamed into Rich Site Summary (RSS) and included elements from Winer’s ScripingNews format but the new name still illustrated Netscape’s thinking about the web as a static thing. When Netscape dropped RSS support Dave Winer picked it up and renamed it into Really Simple Syndication (RSS) to name it into something that it actually was: The RSS protocol as “a way of detecting changes.”³

As I previously described in ‘The Perceived Freshness Fetish’ the web currently has a focus on fresh and updated content on websites. Changes were often manually indicated with “last updated” date displays or by placing the “new.gif” image next to the new or updated content. In 1995 Javascript was an important step in automating when a website was updated with for example the Last Modified Javascript:

<script language="JavaScript"> <!---//hide script from old browsers

document.write( "Last updated "+ document.lastModified );

//end hiding contents ---> </script>

The detection and notification of changes on websites to third parties was automated by RSS. It is a way to detect changes and as such RSS is not necessarily  reverse-chronological as we know from the blogosphere where changed and updated information is presented in a reverse-chronological order.

1. Dornfest, Rael, ‘XML.com: RSS: Lightweight Web Syndication’, XML.com, 2000 <http://www.xml.com/lpt/a/115> [accessed 23 April 2010].[↩]
2. Winer 22 April 2010[↩]
3. Winer 22 April 2010[↩]

In my 2008 thesis on ‘Blogging for Engines. Blogs under the Influence of Software-Engine Relations‘ in the chapter on the History of Blog Software and Blog Engines I wrote about Dave Winer’s role within the pre-blog BBS-scene and his DaveNet (1994) and Scripting News (1997). Back then I used the Internet Archive to track down the history of the early blogosphere and Rudolf Ammann is using the same technique. Dave Winer actually responded to his blog post on ‘Scripting News: Launched on 1 February 1997‘ that if we were to point to DaveNet as a blog (with its reverse-chronological entries) that October 7, 1994 is the day it all started for Dave Winer.

That’s 13 years of blogging. Congratulations!