People like to tell the story of how VHS beat Betamax because adult film studios backed VHS. It’s a clutch-your-pearls story that says nothing about why these multi-million-dollar businesses picked one format over the other. The real story is that while Betamax tapes had better resolution and fidelity, VHS was cheaper, offered longer recordings, and, most importantly, was the more open format.
Not many people talk about how or why RSS won the content syndication war because few people are aware that a war ever took place. Everyone was so fixated on the drama over RSS’s competing standards (Atom vs RSS 2.0) that they barely registered the rise and fall of the Information and Content Exchange (ICE) specification, which had been created, funded, and eventually abandoned by Microsoft, Adobe, CNET, and other household names.
ICE was the Betamax to RSS’s VHS. The Information and Content Exchange standard was more advanced, more expensive, less open, and unable to counter the overwhelming number of bloggers who flooded the market with DIY-friendly RSS feeds.
The dawn of war over syndication
When Pew Research informally asked readers about online activities that had lost their charm, most of the responses mentioned surfing the web, something people used to do for the hell of it, just to see what was out there. That was in 2007, the same year the iPhone launched, long before most of us were addicted to social feeds. One user complained that “the net is no longer a toy but more like a Velveteen Rabbit — while some loved parts have worn away or disappeared, other parts are still in place.” People hadn’t lost interest in surfing so much as the waves of content had grown to crushing heights.
Big-name publishers got a whiff of monetization and became obsessed with content syndication. They figured that if they could make it easier for websites to repackage and republish their articles and eCommerce catalogs, corporate content creators wouldn’t need to worry about declining traffic to their sites. They could simply make a deal with whichever site was currently in vogue.
“Syndication will evolve into the core model for the Internet economy, allowing businesses and individuals to retain control over their online personae while enjoying the benefits of massive scale and scope,” Kevin Werbach wrote in the July ‘99 issue of Release 1.0. “The foundations for pervasive Web-based syndication are now being laid.”
The first attempt came in the form of the Information and Content Exchange (ICE) standard, which, like Betamax, predated its archrival by almost exactly a year. ICE’s stated goal in a March 1998 proposal was to standardize how data posted to one website could be automatically published on other websites. It was unapologetically commercial from day one, promising to “expand publishers’ electronic sales by making it easier to license the same material to multiple sources.”
The My Netscape Network port via Scripting News
RSS entered the game as a humble widget on the experimental My Netscape Network portal. Any website owner who used Netscape’s nascent XML-adjacent tags to create a feed of their website’s updates could have said feed added to Netscape’s list of 600+ “channels”. When a user picked a channel from the list, it added a widget to their personalized My Netscape Network page, aggregating their favorite blogs and news sites on a single page.
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