RSS …. what’s that?

August 8th, 2006 Zeid Nasser (Admin)

RSSlogo

Well, if 88% of office workers in the United States don’t know what RSS is, it’s a wonder we get RSS subscribers in this part of the world.

For those of you who don’t know what Real Simple Syndication (RSS) is, look to the left panel on AdBlogArabia, you’ll see the orange RSS button with a link saying ‘what is this’…. read please!

Anyway, back to the survey in the US, carried out by WorkPlace Print Media, only 9% of the respondents know what an RSS feed is, and a tiny 2% said they subscribed to an RSS feed!

The survey included a national sample of 1,000 US employees at companies with under 2,000 employees.

I’ve always believed that Microsoft is to blame for the difficulty users face with RSS, as Explorer does not have an automatic RSS-feed option, unlike Firefox which makes adding an RSS feed to your browser so easy. Just press the RSS icon, and the site feed becomes a pull-down menu in your browser bar.

Maybe Microsoft will fix that problem with Explorer 7. If and when it does, RSS use will become huge overnight!

And with these current numbers- of 2% subscribers- the potential for RSS growth will have serious implications to marketers and advertisers.

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  • http://www.thearabobserver.blogspot.com/ The Observer

    Thanks for this post about RSS. I have noticed the icon on various blogs but never understood what it stands for. I have wondered before, but didn’t really search to ease my wonder. Now I followed the “What is RSS” Link, and got a better idea :)

  • http://thejfactor.jeeran.com/ Khalidah – The J Factor

    I totally agree with this Zeid ..

    RSS has huge potential in advertising and marketing and it also eliminates spam email if used properly

  • Abhijit Pathak

    I do not think MS is to blame for this… there seems to be other reasons for the same. MS has already included RSS orange icon into its Explorer 7. Download IE7 Beta3 and check this out.

    For the uninitiated readers in your site, IE7 offers an RSS reader too, which is by far the best browser based reader I’ve encountered. It saves all the feeds in a very reader friendly format, as well as gives you a contents of ALL the feeds it has been refreshing and saving. These are available (w/out the pix) even when the internet is off.

    Just another feature – being able to delete a “read” feed would have been more useful.

    RSS and blogging are really going to change the way business is done all over the world. See http://www.content2point0.com/2006/

  • Zeid Nasser (Admin)

    Thanks Abhijit for your valuable comments, and on several posts of AdBlogArabia.

    As you are saying, IE7 will change the RSS scene, and we must be prepared for the implications.

  • http://www.jazarah.net/blog Samer Marzouq

    I agree with you once it is fixed in IE it will grow, but for me I stopped using IE, Firefox is much better.

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