It’s good to see something like this every once in a while. It’s easy to sit there in a little geek cocoon and assume that everyone out there on the interweb is using all the same time-saving tools as you are. But as this article from The Register shows, that’s often not the case.
It seems that two thirds of blog readers haven’t heard of RSS. This will change over the next year as Microsoft are integrating RSS support into the next version of Windows (although they’ve renamed it as “web feeds”) but in the meantime if you want to get a look at what all the cool boys and girls are playing with, take a look at my introduction to RSS article.
To summarise, RSS is a technology that allows you to suck down information from many web sites in one go. If you spend too much time visiting a set list of web sites every day in order to keep up with the new content, then RSS will almost certainly save you time.
And then you will almost certainly use that saved time to suck down content from more sites, eliminating any savings you might have initially realized.
:-)
And it’s a good thing that they’re being called “web feeds,” the obvious reason being that there’s Atom as well and that RSS != RSS, and the less obvious but more important reason being the same for which noone says “HTML site.”