SF Worlds publishes articles about popular worlds in science fiction and fantasy.
Michael Martinez launched the SF-Worlds Website in January 1999 as an experimental Website aggregator. An aggregator republishes the RSS feeds from other sites. RSS was developed by Netscape in the late 1990s and originally meant Rich Site Summary. The RSS format was quickly adopted by many Websites for publishing news headlines. At the time SF-Worlds was the most comprehensive science fiction and fantasy news resource.
Unfortunately Web publishers struggled to keep the RSS feeds updated. The first attempt at promoting RSS technology was weakened when Netscape sold itself to AOL, which did not maintain the commitment to the technology. RSS development was soon after taken over by independent blog platform developers. Web logs (blogs) are content management systems (CMS) that make publishing Websites easy and simple compared to the way people had to do it in the 1990s. The Atom format was popularized by Blogger (Blogspot) and the XML format was popularized by B2, B2Evolution, and WordPress (which was originally forked from B2).
Today millions of Websites publish RSS feeds. Unfortunately, aggressive marketers (“spammers”) took RSS feeds from every possible source and created worthless content aggregators for the sake of publishing advertising. These made-for-advertising (MFA) sites tarnished the reputation of RSS and forced many Websites to stop publishing feeds. Worse, search engines like Bing and Google began punishing Websites that published RSS feeds and little to no other content.
By 2001 it was no longer feasible to promote other Websites through RSS feeds and SF-Worlds was redesigned to promote sites from the Xenite.Org Network. Every few years the site receives a face lift. We publish occasional new content there as well. Current emphasis is on providing fans with information about classic worlds of science fiction and fantasy.
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