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RSS Awareness Day

Boris Written on May 1, 2008 – 11:46 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

RSS iconFor those people who DO know what RSS is and use it it is hard to imagine that most people don’t. According to some research (Pew Internet & Yahoo) only 12% of all people are aware of RSS and less than 4% have knowingly used it.

Although I can imagine that most of our readers (with an interest in The Next Web) do know about RSS I still wanted to tell you about the phenomena since today is official RSS Awareness day.

According to WikiPedia “RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts. An RSS document (which is called a “feed” or “web feed” or “channel”) contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with web sites in an automated manner that can be piped into special programs or filtered displays.”

But maybe this video (titled “RSS in Plain English”) is more interesting to watch:

As you can see in the video, before you start subscribing to the RSS feeds of your favorite sites you will sign-up for (or download) a RSS reader. Try Google Reader, Bloglines or Netvibes.

Once you have your RSS reader working you can subscribe to RSS feeds by clicking the RSS icon on a website or in your browser url field. Most modern web browsers already identify RSS feeds, so you will be able to see the RSS icon. Don’t forget to subscribe to our feed!

I hope you like that post!

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About the author: Serial entrepreneur and founder of several companies. Current activities include TwitterCounter.com and The Next Web Conference & Blog.

7 comments/trackbacks to “RSS Awareness Day”

  1. May 2, 2008: RSS Awareness Day : Flyers Internet Communicatie Weblog

    [...] Artikel op ‘The Next Web’ (EN) [...]

  2. May 2, 2008: RSS: eine geniale Technologie und warum sie kaum jemand nutzt » Beitrag » zweinull.cc

    [...] ihr, dass gestern offizieller “RSS Awareness Day” war? Eben, ich auch nicht, bis ich diesen Beitrag bei The Next Web las. Dort erfuhr ich, dass laut einer Studie von Pew Internet & Yahoo! im [...]

  3. May 4, 2008: Writing and Blogging Info » It’s RSS Awareness Day

    [...] were blogs. Some other blog posts promoting RSS Awareness Day can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. There are also people tweeting about RSS Awareness Day. Below is a [...]

  4. May 20, 2008: How RSS is both under- and overrated

    [...] I don’t do is optimize for RSS. As I have written before in a post title RSS Awareness Day: “According to some research (Pew Internet & Yahoo) only 12% of all people are aware of [...]

  1. By Ernst-Jan Pfauth on May 1, 2008

    Those ‘Plain English’ videos are great. I bet if you make Dutch, German or French version, they’ll be hugely successful as well.

    [Reply]

  2. By ifeedgood on May 1, 2008

    fortunately, we are more to be aware of RSS than 12%, there are recents facts and figures about RSS, 10-15% users in europe, and 20-30 of RSS awareness

    [Reply]

  3. By Paul Veugen on May 2, 2008

    The report by Pew Internet was published in 2005.

    [Reply]

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