# Really Simple Syndication (RSS) RSS is the open standard that lets you subscribe to websites instead of visiting them. Each site publishes an XML file (the feed) listing its latest entries with title, date, summary or full text. Your feed reader polls those files and shows you everything new, in one place, in the order YOU choose. No algorithm in between, no engagement optimization; just the sources you picked. The acronym has meant three different things over the years: RDF Site Summary (the original Netscape version, 1999), Rich Site Summary, and finally Really Simple Syndication with RSS 2.0 in 2002. Dave Winer and Aaron Swartz both shaped its messy, fork-heavy evolution. A competing standard, Atom, appeared in 2003 to clean things up technically; RSS kept the mindshare anyway, and today both work in every reader. RSS peaked in the mid-2000s, then declined as social platforms walled themselves off. Google killed Reader in 2013, and many declared RSS dead. It never died. Podcasting runs entirely on RSS to this day, and the format has been quietly reviving since the late 2010s as people grow tired of algorithmic feeds. I keep coming back to RSS because it puts the reader back in control. It pairs naturally with a PKM workflow: subscribe deliberately, triage in one place, capture what resonates. [[Readwise]] Reader is my aggregator of choice, [[Ghost]] publishes RSS feeds for my own sites out of the box, and the [[RSS Dashboard plugin for Obsidian]] brings feeds straight into the vault. ## References - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS ## Related - [[Readwise]] - [[Ghost]] - [[RSS Dashboard plugin for Obsidian]]