RSS Awareness Day
Today is May 1st. Aside from being the 56th anniversary of the day Mr Potato Head was introduced to the public (a historic day indeed), it is also RSS Awareness Day.
As enthusiastic purveyors of RSS here at Tactical Thinking, we were as keen to play our part in the initiative as kids were eager to stick plastic eyes and ears into potatoes in the 1950’s.
So why do we need an RSS awareness day? Well, as useful and powerful as RSS is, it has yet to become a mainstream technology in the big picture of global internet use.
Feedburner recently reported that they track around 60 million RSS subscribers. Even if we bump that number to 70 million RSS users (counting people that use RSS with other applications or platforms) this would still convert to a meager 5.4% of the Internet users around the world, as of today.
That is still a relatively small group, however with native support for RSS in the latest releases of major web browsers like Firefox2 and IE7, this group will only get bigger. So what can be done speed up this growth, building on the innovators and grabbing the early adopters? One answer is to create an official ‘awareness day’.
Those of you who aren’t familiar with RSS are probably wondering why this percentage is still so small, especially if it’s everything we’re raving about. Would you believe that RSS has been around since 1997? 11 years and yet so few users! One of the main reasons for this is the lack of mainstream supporting software. I say “mainstream” as there’s been a variety of RSS-utlising-applications around for quite some time now. However, unless you work in the IT industry these applications (many of which are available as freeware) are unlikely to appear in your average software lineup.
So today is the first RSS Awareness Day and many bloggers around the world are posting articles and spreading the word. We’re following suit to supplement our last feature explaining the ins-and-outs of RSS. If you missed that, go and read it now—you’ll find a great video primer on the power of RSS—then send it to a friend and help spread the word!
Also, keep an eye out for a subsequent post here at Tactical Thinking discussing the future of RSS and what lies ahead in the world of information gathering technology.
