Netscape's RDF Site Summary (1999), Dave Winer, the Atom split, Bloglines, Technorati, the blogosphere's peak, and the 2013 pivot.
Section 6 of 6 · 2 pieces
Start here
The origin of RSS from Netscape's RDF Site Summary (1999) through Dave Winer's RSS 0.91 simplification and the subsequent 2.0 specification — the people, the arguments, and the accident of timing that put syndication infrastructure in place just as blogging was about to need it.
How It Got Here
Why a group of developers broke from RSS in 2003 to write what became Atom — the technical disagreements were real but the underlying conflict was about who controlled the specification and whether it could evolve.