I’ve been on the RSS bandwagon for a couple of years now. In that time, I’ve managed to convince several of my non-geeky friends and family members to hop on board. However, the vast majority of normal humans I know access the Web through their browser. That’s not surprising.
While Microsoft’s implementation of RSS in Longhorn Windows OutThereSomewhere Windows Vista and Internet Explorer 7.0 will help, I don’t know whether the world at large will take the RSS train any time soon.
I got to wondering how RSS adoption trends applied to this site. I made a little graph, comparing my monthly Web stats to my RSS readership. Here’s what it looks like:
There are intentionally no numbers, because the RSS circulation is a fraction of the total visitors. In September 2004 (when I implemented FeedBurner stats for my feed), about 1 in 10 visitors came to this site via RSS. Now, it’s about 1 in 7. I just wanted to compare the trends.
While this site’s traffic has leveled off in the summer months (it always does), the RSS adoption continues unabated.
Of course, you, my dear readers, are clever, clever people and many of you are early adopters of these kinds of things. As such, I’m not sure this site is generally repesentative of the population at large. I wonder what ratios apply for the CNN or the CBC?
DarrenBarefoot.com 
RSS will become a mainstream technology when it ceases to be RSS. In the same way that no one prompts browsers to view HTML, those wishing to push RSS adoption have to get beyond the acronym and focus on what the technology is doing. Some of this is already happening with the concept of Feeds, but it really has to go further in mom-friendliness to see widespread adoption. A button on the web browser that detected an RSS feed when you visited a site and allowed you to simply subscribe to [site name] (free!) might go a long way toward making the technology unthreatening.