Here’s a little trivia for you:

Q. What well-known technology company invented RSS?
A. Netscape.

If you got that answer correct, kudos to you. RSS, or Rich Site Summary, was created by Netscape as the foundation of their then-new portal, My Netscape, back in 1999.

The idea was ingenious – by allowing web sites to make one of those nifty boxes that are the foundation of portal pages, Netscape created a win-win situation for everybody. Web sites got to display content on a high-profile service. Users got to pick from the largest selection of content available at any portal. And Netscape got to sell banner ads alongside content they were getting for free.

Unfortunately, it seems that everything didn’t go as well as Netscape planned. Around the time the company was acquired by AOL, My Netscape began to fail. Today, it’s just another generic portal, and with AOL firing many Netscape staffers, nobody has any idea how long netscape.com will continue to exist.

RSS is like the golden goose, in my opinion. The first portal to open their content up to the masses will grab significant market share from the other portals, meaning more ad exposures. Many university portals have done this already, but I’m still waiting for a commercial portal to realize the advantages of doing this.