RSS: Podcasting's Secret Sauce

The RSS file really is the secret behind podcasting. RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication.

In the late 1990s, during the first Internet "boom," companies such as Marimba, PointCast, and DataChannel offered news distribution based on a technology known as "push." Push technology delivered information to client PCs when the server was ready to push the content. This turned out to be technologically impractical because the server tried to push the information out all at once, which consumed huge amounts of bandwidth and clogged personal and corporate networks.

A new model called "poll then pull" evolved. In this model, the server did not send out updated information until it was asked for by individual clients. RSS, inspired by the various content syndication formats used in push technology, was originally proposed by Dave Winer in 1997 while he was running a company called Userland. RSS was designed to enable a particular form of news syndication known today as blogging. Other companies such as Netscape and Microsoft developed versions of their own known as RDF and CDF.

Winer attempted to work with Netscape and Microsoft until Netscape abandoned the effort in 1999, and in late 2000 Userland released version 0.92 of the standard. Optional elements including the crucial tag were added in 2002, and RSS was eventually standardized in its current form in July 2003. Several versions of the RSS story exist; you can read them at these sites:

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rssVersionHistory
http://goatee.net/2003/rss-history.html
http://www.rss-specifications.com/history-rss.htm

As interesting as the RSS story is, all you really need to know at this point is that your RSS feed is a critical ingredient in the success of your podcast. It's the mechanism by which folks subscribe to and automatically receive your new episodes.