66% of ‘typical’ blog readers don’t know what RSS is, according to a new report published by Nielsen//Netratings today.

Their ‘Understanding the Blogosphere’ survey came to the conclusion that “nearly five percent of blog readers use feed aggregation software and more than six percent use a feed aggregating Web site to monitor RSS feeds from blogs”.

However, exactly half of the thousand asked said they had never heard of RSS before - these are people who “claim to read blogs regularly”, remember. Do they browse blindfolded? Insults aside, with all the techie buzz around RSS at the moment, these figures might well be a bit of a shock.

Contrary to the flavour of most of my posts, I’m surprisingly critical of most new technologies - I don’t like management speak, and I don’t like all the industry buzz about silly little things, but RSS really is a great idea, and most of the newsreaders around are very capable of making the most of it.

Instead of spending hours and hours trawling through sites checking to see what’s new (and although I miss that odd jollity, I wouldn’t read half the amount of interesting stuff as I do now), you can check 10, or 50, or even 100, sites in the same block of time.

You can subscribe to a feed to keep up with the latest BBC news, or you can get a customized search feed to find the latest blog posts about “socks” on Technorati. The blogging world is so huge these days that it’s almost impossible to read every post you’d like to within the hours in a day, so you need to use RSS to get the most out of it.

I hope Microsoft keep going with their ideas of incorporating RSS into the very centre of Vista - whether they patronizingly call them ‘web feeds’ or not - because hopefully then people will realise it’s not just another cheap geek gimmick - and that it’s actually useful.

Neilsen//Netratings (via The Register)
Read the report in full (PDF download)

Tags: RSS, blog