Six million Americans get news and information from RSS aggregators, according to a nationwide telephone survey conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project in November.
The project, an ongoing survey of the 120 million Americans using the Internet, found that 5 percent follow their favorite sources through RSS syndication. "This is a first-time measurement from our surveys and is an indicator that this application is gaining an impressive foothold."
The survey also found that 27 percent of those polled are weblog readers, a 58 percent jump in the 9 months since the preceding poll was conducted.
I love RSS. I have been using RSS for about 9 months now. The idea that I get notified when a website is updated versus trying to figure if a site has been updated is very useful to me, obviously other people too. I recently read someone coin RSS as the World Live Web.
This is a fact. We have seen this coming for some time now and we know that RSS feed popularity will continue to increase. This brings a problem to the Web servers since as more people subscribe to RSS, the load on the server increase dramatically. For example, RSS bandwidth usage is now as important as the site?s html bandwidth. This is becoming a concern for Webmasters. For RSS to become a viable solution, we need to improve and optimize the RSS protocol. That?s what RSScache.com is doing for some time now. We have come up with a solution that will help web site support the increasing load of RSS feeds. We invite all webmasters or users to try our service.
Interesting how technology has moved forward since the dot com boom days. There seems to be an acceleration of uptake of new technology. One wonders what might have happended if the bubble hadn't burst.
People have the easy choice of subscribing to an RSS feed and just as easy a choice of unsubscribing from an RSS feed.
But even more than that, end-users can choose from dozens and dozens of different RSS aggregators, and it?s becoming very much like this in the RSS publishing solutions market. It would seem that ?almost every? company is starting to see opportunities in the RSS space, and it remains to be seen how many are actually going to achieve more than marginal market penetration.
Few weeks before the free RapidFeeds (Beta version) hosted web-based RSS publishing solution joins the market.
?RapidFeeds is an online web based service, which provides complete RSS Feed management solutions to publishers and webmasters. As the RSS technology is aggressively spreading across the Internet like wildfire, many publishers are realizing the potential it offers. However, there are still a large amount of publishers who are either unaware of RSS or find it too complicated to use. We, at RapidFeeds are trying to target these web publishers and equip them with all the tools and knowledge they require to adapt and use this ever-growing technology. Without the hassles of creating, managing and tracking their RSS Feeds manually.?I gave it a quick spin and have to admit that setting up a feed is a breeze and takes less than 3 minutes, as does adding new content items. They even offer some basic RSS metrics (RSS feed hits, which does not equal RSS feed subscribers or circulation, and clickthroughs).
Does 5% really constitute a skyrocketing? Since this is a first-time measurement, we really don't know where it was before, and 5% doesn't seem like very much. I'd call Firefox a skyrocket (though it does seem to be slowing now), but I'm hesitant to label RSS the same -- despite how badly I *want* it to skyrocket :)
The growth in number of tools that are used for using/reading RSS feeds is a very good sign. I particularly like Mozilla's FireFox for integrating RSS into their browser. They call this feature "Live Bookmarks". Even most of the US government sites such as Dept. of Education (ed.gov) have started using the feeds.
Will RSS support additional separate elements to indicate location or origin of syndication or event? This information can be used to tailor RSS feeds to a user?s location.
RSS will be the main trend for internet user to collect information. However now everything is just starting. Refer to the latest report from Yahoo!, most of the internet user still don't know what RSS is and think that RSS is complicated and hard to use. So there are a lot of works to do to make all the internet user familiar with RSS
rss syndication is getting easier. we use it to provide the exact info to our readers. we can also change it on an hourly or daily basis so that our contect changes with the times and tastes.
RSS 2.0 has become the quickest and easiest way to make news/information available to the general public.
RSS 2.0 allows extensions so you can have a location/origin with the items. Only problem is that you need a RSS reader that knows how to use this extra information.
Over the past 2 years RSS usage grows consistently from my experience (I?ve run number of RSS feeds, for over 2 year). I use to provide Atom 0.3 versions of the feeds but RSS 2.0 seems to have over taken in the general market place.
Now I wonder if Atom 1.0 will affect RSS 2.0. I think people like rss 2.0 because it?s simple and easy to use compared to Atom or even RSS 1.0. Right now the number of creators of RSS feeds is less than the number readers, but I think this will reach a balance point where the people start to get more selective with what they read and start to filter out a lot of the RSS feeds that aren?t up to scratch.
The survey doesn?t include people who listen to podcasts or videocasts which are RSS as well.
