RSS over hyped by the geeks?
Bill Burnham points out that according to a Neilson study only 11% of blog readers use RSS. I had gotten a similar impression while talking to fellow bloggers in Delhi. Many of those who themselves blog do not use an RSS aggregator.
In the light of these numbers, the recent announcement by Microsoft to treat RSS as a first class construct in Windows Vista is particularly significant. IE7 also supports RSS and allows viewing feeds formatted within the browser window. There is nothing like a gentle push from the software giant to increase adoption. That is the thing with standards. They don't mean much unless people actually use them. Microsoft was pretty notorious for flouting standards and its heartening to see them support more and more of open standards!
Comments
Yup, RSS is a really cool thing (Slashdot feed is a must :-D ). Firefox supports both RSS and Atom 2.0 feeds, it is also intresting to see something called erss, which is a module for e17 (enlightenment, an upcoming desktop environment). It basically puts up the RSS feeds on the desktop background, see the screenshot . Its really cool and practically integrates RSS into the desktop environment.
http://xcomputerman.com/albums/screenshots/erss.sized.png
probably the IE move will kill off Atom, and let RSS evolve or maybe they mutate into some middle-path standard. But this funda of feeds is still to catch on as stated above, i faced the problem of having too much info when i was using konfabulator (put on too many feeds) .... got addicted :-D.
Posted by: Dipankar | August 26, 2005 10:41 AM
even though using aggregators, makes it quite easy to track your daily quota of blogs, but you don't really get a good feel through them. Especially with blogs with a lotta addons, like fav quotes etc (mine for ex) :-). Not to mention the kewl looks
Posted by: Kirti Dhingra | August 26, 2005 02:08 PM