RSS and Atom

Ever since Henry Ford told his customers they could have "any color so long
as it's black," our consumer society has been driven by the vision and goals of
just a few creators. But in the 1990s, the emergence of the worldwide Web led
to the explosive popularization of the Internet, and it became clear that the
one-way flow of ideas upon which the consumer society was based would soon
be a memory. The ubiquity of the Internet is now thrusting us headlong into a
new age, where the flow of ideas changes from one-way to many-way, and the
key to society becomes participation instead of just consumption.
It was in that context that a few colleagues and I started the web site
blogs.sun.com for Sun Microsystems. We could see that in a "participation
age," a key to the company's success would be providing the means for Sun's
staff to directly engage with the technology and customer communities in
which they were participating. All over the world, in every corner of human
interest, others have been coming to the same conclusion, and today blogs are
proliferating as fast as web sites did in the early 1990s.
With these blogs, almost incidentally, comes another technology that may
have an even greater effect on society: the syndication feed, a computer-
readable list of blog contents. Used today by blog reader programs and by
aggregators (such as the BlogLines
1
web site or the Planet Roller
2
aggregator,
1
http://www.bloglines.com
2