Weblogging, a term coined by Jorn Barger in December 1997, is one of the most popular and fast growing applications of RSS. A blog is someone's personal dated 'log' frequently updated with new information about a particular subject or range of subjects.

RSS is today one of the hottest and most talked about technology developments affecting the Internet. While it has been around and in use by webloggers since 1999, RSS has only recently attracted mainstream attention. And with that attention has come exponential growth. It is now impossible to keep track of all the organizations deploying RSS, but here is a short list giving a flaver of the coming ubiquitous character of RSS information feeds:

For information publishers, RSS is an extremely efficient way to syndicate content. For web browsers, RSS is a way to regain control of their online experience. In addition to the benefits and time savings of having content delivered to the reader as it is updated, users can better focus on the content by avoiding distractions such as pop-up advertisements and email spam. Below are excerpts from recent press and industry articles discussing RSS. Even from the titles, one can quickly understand why RSS is important.

A brief history of RSS
The original RSS, version 0.90, was designed by Netscape as a format for building portals of headlines to mainstream news sites. It was deemed overly complex for its goals; a simpler version, 0.91, was proposed and subsequently dropped when Netscape lost interest in the portal-making business. But 0.91 was picked up by another vendor, UserLand Software, which intended to use it as the basis of its weblogging products and other web-based writing software.

In the meantime, a third, non-commercial group split off and designed a new format based on what they perceived as the original guiding principles of RSS 0.90 (before it got simplified into 0.91). This format, which is based on RDF, is called RSS 1.0. But UserLand was not involved in designing this new format, and, as an advocate of simplifying 0.90, it was not happy when RSS 1.0 was announced. Instead of accepting RSS 1.0, UserLand continued to evolve the 0.9x branch, through versions 0.92, 0.93, 0.94, and finally 2.0.