That constant blog companion, the RSS feed, is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. These days RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, but that wasn’t always the case. The meaning of RSS has changed a number of times since its initial inception in 1999.

Here is a look at the evolution of the meaning of RSS:

• RSS = RDF Site Summary – RDF Site Summary, the first web syndication format to be called RSS, was offered by Netscape in March 1999 for use on the My Netscape portal. (RDF stood for Resource Description Framework.)
• RSS = Rich Site Summary – In July 1999, Dan Libby of Netscape produced a prototype he called RSS 0.91. This time, RSS was said to stand for Rich Site Summary. Things weren’t made any easier when another team, the RSS-DEV Working Group, decided to launch another version (branch) of RSS (RSS 1.0) in December 2000 which reclaimed the meaning RDF Site Summary.
• RSS = Really Simple Syndication – In September 2002, Dave Winer released a final successor to RSS 0.92, known as RSS 2.0. This time RSS stood for Really Simple Syndication, which is how RSS is still known today.

So as you can see, the meaning of RSS has changed quite a bit through the years:

RDF Site Summary > Rich Site Summary > RDF Site Summary (again) > Really Simple Syndication

It’s like the geek version of the change from Digital Video Disk to Digital Versatile Disk.

Happy 10th anniversary, RSS!

For the curious, RSS has quite a messy and convoluted history that you can read more about on Wikipedia. You might also like to check out Dave Winer’s thoughts about the 10-year anniversary of RSS.

The New England Patriots held what seemed to be a commanding lead (17-15) with five minutes left of Super Bowl XLVI last night. But the New York Giants came back and managed to win with 21-17.

As exciting as the game sounds, we missed the whole thing, instead spending our time watching the Superbowl.com website.

It turned out to be a rather dull thing to do because the site held up well and there was no downtime at all. The response time also didn’t give away anything significant in terms of online Super Bowl traffic.

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As Super Bowl 46 is approaching, fans will flock to the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana, and to TV sets around the world to follow the New York Giants battle it out with the New England Patriots.

Kickoff is scheduled for 6:30EST on Sunday, February 5, and we’re already monitoring Superbowl.com to see how the site will handle the event.

What team will win Super Bowl 46? How will the site cope? We can only wait to find out.

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Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.h

This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on cloud, with a few other topics thrown in to boot.

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Out of the 59 US-based e-commerce sites we monitored during the holiday season last year 28 scored a perfect 100% uptime for December.

Whether this helped spur on the booming sales in the US, we don’t know, but retail e-commerce spending in the US reached $37.2 billion for the November to December 2011 period. That was an increase of 15% from the same period in 2010.

We decided to dig into the numbers for these e-commerce sites to see how well they did in terms of uptime and performance. After massaging the data coming from our Pingdom probes, it turns out that the sites overall performed well during December 2011 in terms of uptime, but response time was an issue for several sites.

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Pingdom’s Mobile Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, and mobile stuff.

In this show, Saleh also gives us an update on the pending submission of his Carbon for Windows Phone Twitter client. We’re also joined by Mario Lurig, who talks about using Amazon S3 and Cloudfront to speed up a website.

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