"The web" has a specific meaning, and IRC and Usenet are not generally considered part of it. RSS is -- the essential concept was even included in the initial

"The web" has a specific meaning, and IRC and Usenet are not generally considered part of it. RSS is -- the essential concept was even included in the initial vision for the web: >With help from Robert Cailliau, [Berners-Lee] published a more formal proposal (on 12 November 1990) to build a "Hypertext project" called "WorldWideWeb" (one word, also "W3") as a "web" of "hypertext documents" to be viewed by "browsers" using a client–server architecture.[4] This proposal estimated that a read-only web would be developed within three months and that it would take six months to achieve "the creation of new links and new material by readers, [so that] authorship becomes universal" as well as "the automatic notification of a reader when new material of interest to him/her has become available." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldwide_web http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldwide_web)