Nik Rawlinson

A long war is brewing. By the time you read this it will already be under way.

While Microsoft may have won the battle of the browsers, it is already lagging behind in a far more important conflict that so far it has barely been acknowledged.

You see, to Microsoft, RSS means Remote Storage Server, and a search on its site for 'RSS feed' returns no hits. To the rest of the world, RSS is RDF Site Summary (or Really Simple Syndication), and the number and quality of RSS feeds is growing exponentially by the day.

It would not be inaccurate to say that this growth is matched only by the early growth of websites. The key difference, though, is that while websites rely on you visiting and viewing through a browser to justify their advertising, RSS feeds can push out the ads direct to your desktop and are subtle enough not to be annoying.

Control of the browser, then, will soon be far less important than Microsoft ever imagined. Control of the feed readers is key.

If you're feeling a bit lost, then here's a quick and easy RSS primer. While content management systems produce regular web pages, many of them also strip out the user-defined content and format it according to RDF, the Resource Description Framework.

RDF is far more regimented and less forgiving than HTML, which means the content it produces can be relied upon to contain only a certain range of elements, unlike web pages which could contain no end of extensions, depending on the host server.

Users then subscribe to these feeds using RSS aggregators, small desktop or web-based applications that draw down headlines and a short excerpt from each posted story every few minutes, and pop up the headlines at the bottom of the screen.

If, like me, your online activity primarily revolves around news sites and weblogs then your browser might soon start gathering dust. It is days since I have launched Netscape or Internet Explorer.

All of my online activity takes place through Postimees Feedreader, a tiny application born in Estonia that sits in my System tray, and pops up a window when a friend posts a new entry on their site, or when the BBC, Deutsche Welle or Reuters publishes a news story.

While some may think this takes away half the fun of web browsing, the fundamental shift in your online experience is difficult to underestimate.

Subscribing to news sources as diverse as Dawn (Pakistan's daily broadsheet), the Intel Pressroom, People's Daily (Chinese state-owned newspaper) and This is London all at the same time means that not only is my news consumption now far broader, but I no longer have to go looking for the stories I need to read - now they come to me.

Content is delivered right onto the desktop, rather than simply being dropped on a page in the hope that someone might someday find it, and this rather dulls Microsoft's victory in the browser wars.

The likelihood of me clicking on a delivered link, rather than one I simply find in my online travels is, I'd guess, around 50 per cent higher, so whoever controls the feeds plays a powerful hand - fortunately, as yet, nobody does.

In RSS feeds we have the ultimate level playing field. They conform to a set standard, and adding new features will simply make a feed less attractive, rather than giving users a reason to upgrade to their readers.

Likewise, with several dozen, or hundred, free readers already in circulation, Microsoft cannot repeat the same undercutting tactic it used against Netscape.

The answer is to add new features to the aggregation software, and we're already starting to see this. Netnewswire, perhaps the most popular aggregator for Mac OS X, is set to go 'Pro' - its existing 'Lite' product has been joined by a paid-for version that incorporates weblog posting, making it quick and easy to pinch a link from someone else's feed.

My guess is that we'll see the $29 fee Netnewswire demands dropped very soon, as a proliferation of similar products emerges.

Already Newsmonster offers to integrate similar functionality into any Mozilla-based browser, including Netscape. I tried it out, but several Java errors later and an irksome change of my default homepage, I switched back to Feedreader.

So, after years of faithful service, my browser has been put out to pasture. I throw the odd bit of work its way - most often on Friday afternoons when the weekly emails of comedy links do the rounds - but the days of having it run 24/7 in my Taskbar are long gone.

If Microsoft wants to repeat its browser-wars success it should deploy its troops posthaste. RSS aggregators will have to be integrated into the next release of Windows - or perhaps the next service pack - so we can have feeds scrolling along the task bar, the way they do in KDE, if Microsoft decides RSS is where it needs to be.

That, though, will probably see the company back in court, but fighting on a different front this time, which I doubt any of us want to see.

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