RSS and Blogs
ITNews Australia reports that RSS for checking blogs still hasn’t caught on.
HitWise researcher LeeAnn Prescott said a comparison of traffic to online newsreaders and the Web’s most popular blogs indicates that only early adopters are using the newsreaders.
The typical US Internet user has yet to adopt Web-based newsreaders for checking blogs, a Web metrics firm said Friday.
While acknowledging that her findings are not conclusive, HitWise researcher LeeAnn Prescott said a comparison of traffic to online newsreaders and the Web’s most popular blogs indicates that only early adopters – primarily businesspeople and the technology savvy ” are using the newsreaders.
This part of the report caught my eye, ‘The HitWise numbers do not take into account desktop newsreaders, such as FeedDemon, or aggregators supplied by portals, such as Yahoo. ‘
I wonder how many people are using portals like Yahoo and don’t know they are using RSS? Perhaps they think they are ‘customizing’ their ‘home page’ which is what I think Yahoo wants people to think. No intimidating words like RSS to confuse the issue.
Maybe a more interesting statistic would be, ‘How many people use a service like Yahoo to get their news or follow their favorite blogs?’ I bet the numbers would be surprising.
You’ve probably seen it already but last year’s white paper on RSS by Yahoo! (http://publisher.yahoo.com/rss/RSS_whitePaper1004.pdf) is pretty good in showing how many users are using RSS but are completely unaware of RSS.
Yes – I have seen it but I didn’t refer to it because anything before about yesterday is old news! At least it seems that way. ;-)
In fact, wasn’t that published in 2005? Hmm – I’ll have to go check.
Cathy