Wind window: China RSS current situation Depth survey

Rss

Editor's note: RSS is relatively unfamiliar to China's vast majority of Chinese netizens, but it is likely to become one of the hottest keywords on China's Internet in the 2005. Starting in 2004, RSS began to explode in the United States, the World Network also closely follow the trend of the end of last year, the introduction of RSS services, as the country's most important RSS it news sources, and watch the world \ Zhou Botong and other leading RSS reader set up a strategic partnership. This article will look at the world provided by the "RSS technology profile and its development in China," released, readers. Another article has all the deletions)

Introduction

The news publishing industry is facing many opportunities and challenges today in the ascendant of Internet. Emerging new technologies make it increasingly possible to release, receive, and use stable, efficient, real-time, secure, low-cost news information, and the cost of implementing and using these technologies is declining, increasingly becoming part of the daily life and work of information publishers and users.

RSS Technology is an outstanding representative of the latest technology in the Internet, and it is a wonderful new technology in the field of news publication, information release and interactive communication.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the history of RSS technology, current situation at home and abroad, and future development forecast. In addition, in the second half of the article, we introduced the world, the largest Chinese RSS technology and service providers, its service architecture, and its news publishing industry for the RSS electronic publishing solutions.

Introduction to RSS Technology

The development course of RSS technology

RSS is an acronym for "Rich Site Summary" or "Really Simple Syndication", which is called "Easy information aggregation" in Chinese. RSS is a content packaging and delivery protocol that is widely used on the internet based on XML standards.

RSS Technology was born in Netscape (Netscape) in 1999. Netscape then defined a language that described news channels, RSS, to deliver Web content to Netscape's navigator Internet browser. But because of the company's internal business decisions, the lack of Internet content, and many other reasons, Netscape finally released only a 0.9 version of the specification. Microsoft also launched a similar data specification, very close to RSS, and tried to use the news channel architecture to turn "push" technology into an application mainstream, bundled in IE browser against Netscape Navigator. But unfortunately, because of the slow speed of Internet access, lack of content, users are not familiar with the reasons, this "push" technology has not been widely supported by the market.

But as time goes on, with the development of XML technology and the rapid growth of the blog group, it has been widely accepted by people, and its application scope has already jumped out of the simple blog circle, becoming an indispensable new technology in many fields such as news media, electronic commerce and enterprise knowledge Management. The development of RSS technology standards was taken over by the company Userland of Dave Winna (Dave Winer) in 2001 to continue to develop new versions to suit the needs of new network applications. Through the efforts of Dave Winna, RSS was upgraded to version 0.91, then reached version 0.92, and was subsequently accepted and supported by numerous professional news sites. In a wide range of applications, many professionals recognize the need to organize, to develop RSS as a generic specification, and further standardize. A joint team redefined RSS based on the new generation of Semantic Web technology RDF, released RSS version 1.0 and defined RSS as "RDF Site

Summary ". The work did not communicate effectively with Dave Wen, and Dave insists on further developing the next version of RSS 2.0 in the direction he envisions, while not acknowledging the validity of RSS 1.0. RSS began to differentiate and form the RSS 0.9x/2.0 and RSS 1.0 two camps.

Dave Winna upgraded RSS to version 2.0 alone in September 2002 and is being maintained by Harvard Law School Berkman internet and Sociology Center. RSS version 1.0 is still maintained by the consortium.

Recently, the famous Internet search engine company Google acquired the U.S. large blog Service website www.blogger.com, so that the site has been used in a similar to the RSS technology derivative version atom overnight become the RSS domain standards of the new strong competitor. Currently, these three technical standard camps (RSS 0.9x/2.0,rss 1.0,atom 0.3) are engaged in a mutually compatible dialogue, believing that there will be positive results in the near future.

Despite the differences in technical standards, the current RSS content reading software on the market, including the only professional Chinese RSS reader-looking at the world-supports all three technical standards. That is, no matter how the RSS content provider decides which standard to use to wrap his or her content, it is transparent and has no effect on the users who see the World Reader software.

The characteristics of RSS technology

RSS defines the packaging and publishing format of content through the XML standard, enabling both content providers and recipients to benefit from it. RSS technology provides a real-time, efficient, secure, low-cost source of information for content providers, and RSS technology provides a new reading experience for content recipients. Several notable features of RSS technology are summarized as follows:

• Personalized "aggregation" features from diverse sources

Because RSS is a widely used content packaging definition format, any content source can use this way to publish information, including professional news sites, E-commerce sites, corporate sites, and even personal sites. On the client side, the function of RSS reader software is to use the user's preference, selectively "aggregate" the content source of the user's interest to the interface of the software, and provide the "one-stop" service for the users ' multiple source information.

• Timeliness, low cost characteristics of information release

RSS technology adhering to the concept of "push" information, when the new content in the server database in the first time is "pushed" to the user-side reader, greatly improve the timeliness and value of information. In addition, the server-side content of the RSS packaging in the technology to achieve a very simple, but also a one-time work, so that the long-term information release marginal cost of almost zero, is completely traditional e-mail, satellite transmission, internet browsing, such as publishing methods can not be compared.

L No "junk" information, convenient local content management features

RSS reader software is characterized by the user in accordance with their preferences in the form of "channel" subscription to trustworthy content sources, such as "Xinhua International News", "China Automotive Network Market", "Tenkine It product information" and so on. RSS reader software completely masks all other users do not subscribe to the content and pop-up ads, spam and other disturbing noise content. In addition, to download to the Reader software local subscription RSS content, users can offline reading, archive retention, search sequencing, related classification and other management operations, so that the reader software is not only a "reading" device, but also a user with the "database."

The development of RSS technology in foreign countries

Market statistics

RSS technology in the western developed countries, especially the United States, has reached a considerable scale. According to incomplete statistics, the number of Web sites in the United States to provide RSS content increased from more than 1000 in September 2001 to more than 195,000 in September 2004, a short period of three years, the growth of nearly 150 times times, the rapid development of the market is a goal.

RSS market content in the United States provides quotient

In these RSS content providers, of course, there are many blog sites and individuals, but more is to recognize the advanced nature of RSS technology, the advantages of the commercial web site, the support of RSS technology as an increase in site traffic, promote the site brand, better serve the users important means. As the number of RSS content soared, so did the number of RSS users (from 100,000 users in August 2001 to nearly 9 million in August 2004, see chart below).