Well I just finished reading a very interesting article over at particletree.com. Keeping abreast of the latest developments relating to RSS feeds and how they are being leveraged to track and supply information has been a weak point of mine but this article has once again got me looking at searching and information retrieval in a new light. I had already noticed the power of blogs and RSS though as I was recently playing around with some web stat generation tools and I ran the tools against a set of data that included all the logs for all of the sites that Disciplina Networks hosts for the last 9 months. What was really interesting to note was that initially the sites were basic static sites but that nonetheless contained some interesting material. Almost immediately google and the other robots came along and start indexing it but still the overall traffic and hits on the various sites remained quite low. A few months into the data set and I started putting up some blogs and immediately you could see the average amount of hits and overall profile of the sites started to change. Of course the coup de grace in this respect was the moment I had a link from my planet gentoo blog back to here with my average traffic now spiking about ten times higher then what it was before that point.
Despite all of this though I wonder to what extent technical people are driving RSS at this point. All of my friends that I would consider tech savvy are using RSS, to differing extents but still they are using it, but outside of that circle of people almost no one else I know is using it. This makes me wonder, are all technologies like this? Driven almost exclusively by a (comparatively) small crowd of technologically savvy people and only making it into mainstream after a certain event / level of popularity pushes it there? Or all of this really just helping those who spend their time on the web surfing in the first place? Will RSS really change how we use the net or will it just be another tool that helps a small amount of people regain some lost time?
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