For those with long memories of the Web industry, RSS is what was once called "push" technology, but done right this time, from the grass roots up. It's a level playing field shared by individuals and big and small publishers. Salon, the New York Times and many other publications have long offered their headlines in RSS form. All you need is any one of a multitude of blogging tools (like Radio UserLand, which we use here for Salon Blogs) to begin distributing your own.

I started seriously using RSS to read my blogs in the last couple of months. I'm now closing in on 100 subscriptions in my Bloglines aggregator -- and instead of wasting time clicking on bookmarks, I'm finding it's getting easier and easier to keep up with a wider set of subjects. (Bloglines is a free Web-based application; you can find a list of many other flavors of RSS reader here.) Every day, some new resource I enjoy or depend on has begun offering an RSS feed. That's where the RSS explosion really makes it feel like 1994 all over again.

Like HTML before it, RSS is neither especially elegant nor hugely complex. Like HTML, it has been the subject of a certain amount of high-profile bickering. (Here's one survey of the technical story from Mark Pilgrim, and here's Dave Winer's take on some of the issues that have divided RSS developers.) And like HTML, it has achieved wide adoption, in spite of some version incompatibilities, because of its essential simplicity and eminent usefulness.

But unlike HTML, it does not have a good name yet, a label -- like "the Web" -- that quickly conveys to a nontechnical person what it's all about. RSS's initials have stood, at various points in its evolution, for "Rich Site Summary," "RDF Site Summary," "Really Simple Syndication," and probably other phrases I'm forgetting. None of these does us much good.

RSS needs a better colloquial name. And easier, more intuitive interfaces for aggregators. And a simpler method for subscribing to feeds (right now you need to copy the URL from one of those increasingly ubiquitous orange "XML" buttons on a site -- if you click on the button, you'll just get raw XML in your browser, which confuses novice users no end).

Once those barriers are overcome, and I don't doubt they will be, I don't see anything else in the way of RSS becoming a vast tide in the affairs of the Net. RSS isn't going to replace e-mail, as some have suggested; but the ravages of spam make it an increasingly attractive alternative for many kinds of one-to-many communication. Some publications are already experimenting with ads in RSS feeds. Microsoft says it's building a ton of RSS support into its next-generation Longhorn operating system. And, since RSS is a format for structured XML data, there's a lot more that programmers can and will do with it beyond the simple subscribe-and-aggregate model that has put it on the map.

Like so many other online innovations, RSS found its first avid users in the world of software developers. But it has already leapt out of that subculture and developed avid followings in politics, law, medicine and other fields. As the lines between "publisher" and "subscriber," "producer" and "audience" get increasingly blurred and decreasingly useful, RSS will be at the center of the action -- helping deliver on the Internet's promise of personal publishing for all. If, as the saying in the blogosphere has it, "In the future everyone will be famous for 15 people," RSS is how your 15 readers will keep up with you -- and how you will keep up with as many others as you want.

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