The Role of RSS in Science Publishing: Syndication and Annotation on the Web
Tony Hammond, Timo Hannay, and Ben Lund
Nature Publishing Group
D-Lib MagazineDecember 2004
Volume 10 Number 12

Introduction
"RSS is one of a new breed of technologies that is contributing to the ever-expanding dominance of the Web as the pre-eminent, global information medium. It is intimately connected with—though not bound to—social environments such as blogs and wikis, annotation tools such as del.icio.us [1], Flickr [2] and Furl [3], and more recent hybrid utilities such as JotSpot [4], which are reshaping and redefining our view of the Web that has been built up and sustained over the last 10 years and more [n1]. Indeed, Tim Berners-Lee's original conception of the Web [5] was much more of a shared collaboratory than the flat, read-only kaleidoscope that has subsequently emerged: a consumer wonderland, rather than a common cooperative workspace. Where did it all go wrong?"

RSS: Your Gateway To News & Blog Content
By Danny Sullivan, Editor, SearchEngineWatch
"Even if the major search engines fail to make blog searching a reality, there are already a variety of ways you can do it now. Indeed, last month at least two new blog searching services were launched, Feedster and RSS Search.

To be accurate, both are actually RSS search engines. They accept content not by crawling the web but instead by receiving RSS feeds, a mechanism for site owners to allow others to easily learn about new articles and content they've posted."