Since it was Father’s Day here in Sweden yesterday – yes we know it varies around the world – we thought we’d pay homage to some of the people behind the Internet as we know it today.

Some of the obvious choices would include Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn for TCP/IP, Vannevar Bush for much of the conceptual thinking behind the Internet, Ted Nelson for coining the word hypertext, Tim Berners-Lee for the World Wide Web, Marc Andreeseen for co-authoring Mosaic, and many others.

But why go for the obvious? We thought it would be fun to give some credit to a few lesser-known contributors to some technology or product that is a part of Internet history. These are guys who have made important contributions that affect us all but that may not have received the same accolades as others. So even though this didn’t exactly turn out to be a Father’s Day post, let’s take a look.

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When it comes to keeping up with blogs and other websites, a common complaint is information overload. Even if you subscribe to receive site updates through an RSS reader, it’s easy to wind up with more items in your reader than you have time to actually read. You may still want to read some of those posts, but if you don’t want to read all of them, searching through your reader for the important news items can be almost as much of a burden as going from site to site.

Because of the ongoing concern of information overload, many people who previously relied on RSS have drifted away from it. However, RSS readers are evolving to solve these issues and improve their usefulness.

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Lately there has been a lot of talk about RSS being dead, doomed, dying, a thing of the past, etc, etc, etc. (The latest wave seems to have been triggered by this article by Sam Diaz over at ZDNet.)

The arguments we’ve seen range from “these days I only use Twitter” to “I don’t use Google Reader anymore”. That last one seems to be a major gripe.

Come on, people.

RSS is a data syndication mechanism. RSS reader applications (such as the Google Reader) may or may not be losing some popularity, but that is an application issue and to go from there to saying that RSS itself is dead is just nonsense. That’s similar to saying that HTML is dead.

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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.

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A huge number of blogs use Feedburner to syndicate their RSS feeds. Since the service was launched in 2004, it’s pretty much become the de facto standard for this. With so many bloggers relying on Feedburner, reliability and performance is of course extremely important. RSS feeds, just like websites, need to be available all the time on the Web.

We have tested Feedburner’s RSS feed performance and uptime.

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We started using FeedBurner just a couple of months ago. This has allowed us to get some reasonable statistics on the number of people who have subscribed to the Royal Pingdom RSS feed. We are happy to say that the numbers have been growing, slowly but steadily. Lately, our blog has started to go above [...]

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Pingdom has opened up the gates for programmer creativity. No matter how many features we or anyone else have, there will always be something that at least one user wants that isn’t there. There will always be special needs. We decided that we didn’t want to limit any of our customers, and have therefore given [...]

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