Two (independent) articles that point to a cause-and-effect:
WebWatch – RSS: 98 per cent of surfers shun itA report from Forrester Research has found that just two per cent of US internet users are making use of RSS feeds.
7Nights: Fixing (RSS/Atom) Newsfeed Subscription
There has been a whole bunch of talk about how unusable the blogging subscription/syndication model is. The problem is that it’s not an easy thing to explain, and many developers and designers have gone and made it harder by spreading around terms and conventions that don’t really work.
I don’t find either conclusion particularly suprising – you have to consider that for most people, the cutting edge of IT usage is what they experience in the workplace, and the majority of workplaces have yet to progress much beyond basic email and file storage in the way they (fail to) exploit the potential of the systems they are using. And home computing is still dominated by a virus-and-spyware ridden AOL paradigm.
So perhaps the surprise is that RSS usage is as high as 2%?
[UPDATE: here's the original source from Forrester, and an interesting comment from The RSS Weblog - far from lack of knowledge being a problem, it could actually be a symptom of a successful shielding of the technology from those who don't know (or care) about it...]
