RSS wasn't invented

By Dave Winer on 1/2/07; 12:58:48 PM.

In the dustup over Microsoft's RSS patents, some of the mainstream press brought up, once again, the issue of Who Invented RSS. But RSS doesn't have an inventor. It wasn't invented. Something else happened, something harder than invention, imho -- an activity that we don't have a word for in the English language.  

First, let's try to figure out what happened, never mind, for the moment, how it happened. 

Today it's very common for a news oriented site, whether it's a blog or a newspaper, or a company or government organization, television or radio network, library, candidate, political party, university, sports team, anyone with news and people who are interested in that news, to have a feed. There are quite a few formats, but RSS 2.0 is the most prevalent.  

Now, if you were to draw a graph of this phenomenon, plot time on the X-axis and level of adoption on the Y-axis, you'd see a rising function, maybe a few setbacks here and there, but for the most part, every year there was more adoption than the year before.  

But during the years that everyone argues about, at the beginning, there wasn't much upward motion at all. The "invention" of RSS, muddied as it was, by prior art, wasn't responsible for its uptake. Rather there were several significant moments along the way: support by individual publications, individual bloggers, then blogging tools, then a small number of aggregators and readers, then a few very large publishers, then a flood of publishing and reading tools, followed by a flood of content. And podcasting, which also builds on RSS, helped fuel the fire. 

Some of this growth was organic, it was created by previous growth. And other leaps were caused by innovation, new ideas, and some by arm-twisting, or evangelism. It's in this area that my commitment to RSS was instrumental. If it had been left at the "invention" stage, it would be where many other XML-related technologies are today, invented, but not much-used. Something new was done with the cloud of content, tools, aggregators, and that allowed a lot more people to use it, or hear about it, or decide it was finally time to support it.  

RSS, unlike other XML inventions, has made a difference. If you want to understand what made RSS happen, it's the innovation, evangelism and commitment that was behind it, not the invention, because I said before, and as everyone seems to agree, it wasn't invented. But we lack a good word for the other stuff, so sheez, what's the big deal if they substitute "invention" for all that? I've looked the other way. But to say I was the "self-proclaimed" inventor is just wrong, I just nod my head when others say it, because I'm tired of arguing.  

Anyway, the curve has been going up steadily through 2006, but this coming year I expect to see some setbacks.  

Ominously, various publishers and technologists are carving out private spaces, where only their tools can play, or only their special of flavor of RSS is understood. It's inevitable, it was bound to happen. The interesting question is: Will much light come from the discussion as the new services come public, or will the mud-slinging exemplified by the mainstream press, in the last round of discussion, hide the ideas.