RSS, OPML and Weblog Ecosystems: A Survey of New Technologies in Internet Publication

With the rapid growth of weblogs (or “blogs”) over the past year, users require a way of rapidly accessing recent content from many different websites. Traditional websites are inadequate for this, as their content and presentation information are inseparably intertwined. This paper describes the development of the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) specifications as a solution for this problem. This paper also describes the RSS readers or aggregators used to process content in the RSS format, the growth in the use of Outline Processor Markup Language (OPML), and the development of environments for ranking the relative importance of blogs (commonly known as blog ecosystems).