Bill has a great post regarding the slow adoption of RSS, mentioning “a Neilsen study that reveals only 11% of blog readers use RSS and that a whooping 66% of blog readers don’t even know what RSS is”, and cautions VCs who are investing in the space on their expectation of adoption”. I have a different perspective on the interpretation of these statistics.
I think that the result might vary drastically based on the question being asked, and will venture that if you asked people open questions like “How do you access/read your favorite blogs” and “How do you bookmark a blog in order to remember it”, people would respond that they get new articles/headlines in MyYahoo or some other program that shows the latest changes – without having any idea of how these “changes” got there.
And for argument sake, people are reading blogs looking at them as websites that have a few display characteristics (strange labels like Permalinks, Trackbacks, Tags, etc.). Bill cites the example of a popular political blogger who did not publicize his feed up until recently and ended up with a “Syndicate this Site (XML)” on his blog. This could actually be a question for the survey: if I show you a link (or a label) “Syndicate this Site (XML)”, what do you think will happen when you click on it ? You can only imagine the deep perplexity of the novice, presented with the option of selecting several feeds expressed in RSS 0.91, Atom, and RSS 2.0 – as everyone knows RSS 2.0 is important because of its support of enclosures, and so does Atom. Deep perplexity then turns into raw anxiety when the dude clicks on the orange XML button, and ends up staring at well formed XML (because of the lack of a default stylesheet, what was he thinking).
Isn’t there a lesson in the fact that podcast downloads have significantly increased when iTunes made them available like… tunes – something that users are familiar with ?
Just for the sake of it, how many people surfing the Internet would confess that, yes they have been using HTML and a bit of TCP/IP (and don’t need to call their lawyer) ?
"RSS" is a fundamental technology, it just has to disappear “in the fabric”. "Blog" is fine I guess – it is a website that makes it easy for people to engage in open conversations (though, provided that comments are turned on, in some cases that you have a TypeKey or enter a Catcha phase or wait for the moderation queue to be processed – whoops – here we go again).
Misere.
Bill’s last paragraph is also quite telling, especially by its generic nature:
Perhaps most importantly, I think it underscores that VCs have to be careful not overestimate near term adoption rates. Just because something is "hot" within the incestuous and self-centered world of Silicon Valley doesn’t mean that it is hot elsewhere or even destined to be hot elsewhere.
So true it hurts.