RSS (RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication)[2] is a web feed[3] that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format.

[4] Websites usually use RSS feeds to publish frequently updated information, such as blog entries, news headlines, episodes of audio and video series, or for distributing podcasts.

The RSS reader checks the user's feeds regularly for new information and can automatically download it, if that function is enabled.

The basic idea of restructuring information about websites goes back to as early as 1995, when Ramanathan V. Guha and others in Apple's Advanced Technology Group developed the Meta Content Framework.

[8] RDF Site Summary, the first version of RSS, was created by Dan Libby, Ramanathan V. Guha, and Eckart Walther at Netscape.

Winer published a modified version of the RSS 0.91 specification on the UserLand website, covering how it was being used in his company's products, and claimed copyright to the document.

[15] The RSS-DEV Working Group, a project whose members included Aaron Swartz,[16] Guha and representatives of O'Reilly Media and Moreover, produced RSS 1.0 in December 2000.

[19] In September 2002, Winer released a major new version of the format, RSS 2.0, that redubbed its initials Really Simple Syndication.

Because neither Winer nor the RSS-DEV Working Group had Netscape's involvement, they could not make an official claim on the RSS name or format.

[21] The Atom syndication format, whose creation was in part motivated by a desire to get a clean start free of the issues surrounding RSS, has been adopted as IETF Proposed Standard RFC 4287.

In July 2003, Winer and UserLand Software assigned the copyright of the RSS 2.0 specification to Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, where he had just begun a term as a visiting fellow.

[22] At the same time, Winer launched the RSS Advisory Board with Brent Simmons and Jon Udell, a group whose purpose was to maintain and publish the specification and answer questions about the format.

[26] This effectively made the orange square with white radio waves the industry standard for RSS and Atom feeds, replacing the large variety of icons and text that had been used previously to identify syndication data.

An example feed could have contents such as the following: When retrieved, RSS reading software could use the XML structure to present a neat display to the end users.

There are various news aggregator software for desktop and mobile devices, but RSS can also be built-in inside web browsers or email clients like Mozilla Thunderbird.

The RSS 2.0 specification was later updated to include examples of entity-encoded HTML; however, all prior plain text usages remain valid.

[30] The primary objective of all RSS modules is to extend the basic XML schema established for more robust syndication of content.

[citation needed] For example, applications that rely on the Common Feed List of Windows might handle such files as if they were corrupt, and not open them.

To be included in a podcast directory the feed must for each episode provide a title, description, artwork, category, language, and explicit rating.

RSS feeds which provide links to .torrent files allow users to subscribe and automatically download content as soon as it is published.