Thursday, 1 May 2008, is RSS Awareness Day. There’s a grassroots effort to increase the awareness and use of RSS (and syndication tools in general). On the RSS Awareness Day site, it is claimed that “Feedburner recently reported that they track around 60 million RSS subscribers.”
Of course, there are a lot more Internet users today than there were in 2005 (one estimate puts the total at 1.3 billion at the end of December 2007). I would go so far as to triple Feedburner’s estimate to 180 million RSS subscribers, to account for all the users that Feedburner does not know about. And there have to be millions of them: people who “use RSS” without being actively aware of it, such as through “live bookmarks” in Firefox, Safari, and IE, or from web sites that themselves are amalgamations of feeds from other publications. People do not need to know what RSS is to use it.
Still…. even if we triple the number of users Feedburner thinks there are to 180 million, it is still only 13.8% of 1.3 billion users out there. That’s not a particularly overwhelming market penetration figure for something as gosh-darned handy as RSS.
So — talk about RSS on May 1, especially if you can do so without preaching to the converted. You and I probably do not need to be sold on the benefits. But our patrons do. But our parents probably don’t. Take advantage of the first RSS Awareness Day to spread the word.