It's RSS Awareness Day

Posted on May 1, 2008

Bloggers and people in the Internet industry are aware of RSS but it's reach seems to stop there. To inform more people about the benefits of RSS the RSS Awareness Day campaign was launched by Daily Blog Tips. The official RSS Day website has a page with buttons and banners for bloggers who want to spread the word about the RSS holiday. This page also contains information that shows how few Internet users know about RSS.

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.
What is the takeaway message? Only a very small percentage of the Internet population is aware of the RSS format and its benefits, and that number is growing slowly over time.
By creating the RSS Awareness Day and celebrating it every year we should be able to get the general public exposed to this format, hopefully increasing the usage of RSS feeds and related applications among Internet users.

While knowledge of RSS may not be breaking into the mainstream there are apps and widgets using RSS behind the scenes. Many people may not be aware of RSS that regularly use and benefit from it. Blogs used to have a similar problem - people were reading them without realizing they were blogs.

Below is a helpful video that explains RSS for anyone who is new to the technology.