Scott Hanselman has a funny way of blogging about things right after I start using them.  In this case, he's talking about RSS auto discovery.  I had just been digging around in my dasBlog theme to ensure that I had the right tag for RSS auto discovery earlier in the day.  Auto discovery is a great little mechanism for, if nothing else, alerting the user that you have a feed available (in case they didn't notice your feed icon).

As I embark on this blog project in the hopes of being interesting enough to garner a regular readership, I've done a lot of thinking lately regarding the nature of content syndication and its ultimate place in our society.  I'm a religious user of a RSS.  I monitor about 25 different feeds on various topics using an online aggregator (up until a few days ago I'd been using Bloglines, but now I'm giving NewsGator a try).  I'm an advocate for RSS.  I wrote a whitepaper for Commerce's online banking product management suggesting how we could implement private account information feeds in our online banking site.  Unfortunately, though, the response was lukewarm.  It seems I failed to take into account that only 4% of Internet users knowingly use RSS.

So what's the deal?  Why hasn't RSS caught on?  I've read some ramblings lately of "information overload", and that the feeds are providing data faster than people can keep up with them.  I suppose that may be the case if you have 50 or 60 feeds, but for my purposes, 25 seems to be a good number.  I set my aggregator to only show new items, I skim the headlines, and if the article doesn't seem appealing to me, I let the reader mark it as read automatically.  I don't ever browse the web anymore.  I just check my aggregator to see if there's any new content, rather like e-mail.

So, what's the difference?  Why does everyone use e-mail, yet nobody uses RSS?  Surely, subscribing to a site's feed isn't such a complex notion.  It isn't any more complicated than e-mail.  I think the issue is one primarily of awareness.  When I presented my whitepaper regarding RSS in online banking, the most common response I got was, "What's RSS?"  Obviously, these people are part of the other 96%.  After I explained what it was and what I wanted to do with it, everyone thought it was a really groovy idea, but doubted if anyone would use it.  I bet if it had a sexier name (rather than an acronym), everyone would be using it.

So, as an advocate of RSS, what do I suggest we do?  Spread the gospel.  Show people how your aggregator works and how convenient it makes retrieving your Internet content.  Firefox users may not realize that it uses RSS automatically (via auto discovery) in a feature called Live Bookmarks.  IE users will have a similar feature in version 7.0 (currently in beta).