Stephen Downes

This article starts off as praise for RSS and ends up as a lament for the web in general. The RSS part boils down to essentially this: "Imagine reading the web without popups, without ads, without nag screens. Imagine reading the web without interruptors or 'keep reading' links... RSS readers are really easy to set up and - crucially - make using the web much easier." The lament for the web is... well, you can imagine. Cory Doctorow's 'history of RSS' is different from my own history, and Google plays a much larger role in his. True, Google and Apple and Spotify and the rest have all tried to kill RSS. But in tech you can't kill what you don't own, and nobody owns RSS, so it continues to work - and always has worked since its early exciting days in the late 90s.