Tom Scheinfeldt emailed me a link to a nice wiki entry on the history of RSS, which in turn led to more reading on RSS's history. A few links of interest:

• Mark Pilgrim's "brief history of RSS from July 2000 to November 2000," during which time RSS "forked." Pilgrim has documented lots of interesting discussions.

• Joseph Reagle's"Web RSS (Syndication) History" is a brief but detailed timeline of RSS's development.

• WebReference.com's The Evolution of RSS.

• Dave Riner's RSS 2.0 Political FAQ: An interview with the principle creator of RSS.