Reuters Schools Us on RSS

Reuters has a good overview article on RSS. It quotes Charlene Li and Jeff Jarvis and throws out this stat: only two percent of online consumers use RSS, according to Forrester, and more than half of that group is 40 years old or younger. The article cites that part of the challenge is the geekiness of it all.

Comments

[Randy Charles Morin]

Those stats are false. You can say that only 2% of users know they are using RSS. But anybody with a MySpace blog (or any blog) or that uses Google Blog Search (or similar), is in fact using RSS, but they just don't know it.

[Kevin Dugan]

Whether or not 2% is accurate, I'm assuming penetration is still low.

Yet you're saying the term social media is dead? Seems early...kinda like Gartner saying blogs are jumping the shark in 07?

[kenji mori]

If the response rates of email newsletter are in general falling (don't have the stat though), then we have no choice.

[Justin Thorp]

Regardless of the stats, RSS is geeky. There is too high of a learning curve for there to be mass adoption.

So what's the cure? How can we change the experience so that everyone understands it?

[Tony]

There's no significance to mentioning that "more than half of that group is 40 years old or younger" because that fact is almost certainly true about Internet users in general so it has no bearing upon RSS in particular.