Feedburner recently reported that they track around 60 million RSS subscribers. Even if we bump that number to 70 million RSS users (counting people that use RSS with other applications or platforms) this would still convert to a meager 5,4% of the Internet users around the world, as of today.

What is the takeaway message? Only a very small percentage of the Internet population is aware of the RSS format and its benefits, and that number is growing slowly over time.

By creating the RSS Awareness Day and celebrating it every year we should be able to get the general public exposed to this format, hopefully increasing the usage of RSS feeds and related applications among Internet users.

There's been a lot of discussion this weekend about the subscriber counts that have recently appeared in Reader's search results. Leaderboards have been drawn up, numbers are being compared and in some cases there's confusion as to how these numbers compare with other subscriber metrics. Additionally, we've made changes (some as recently as today) as to how counts are being calculated. This is probably going to be pretty boring unless you're a feed publisher, but we thought it would be best to explain things a bit. Here are the various numbers you may come across, and what they all mean:

Google subscriber counts: These numbers include subscribers across all Google services, including Reader, iGoogle, and Orkut. You can see them in Reader's feed search results (pictured below) and the Google Webmaster Tools. Additionally, our crawler reports them to the publisher each time we fetch the feed. Reader's feed search was recently showing stale and incomplete data, but as of today (October 15) the numbers should be the same everywhere.

There are more features to come, as Beta Bloglines is iterated on - including new options for saving, sending and sharing posts, as well as building link blogs, managing blog rolls, etc. Also coming soon is upgraded developer APIs. One of the more exciting future features from my point of view will be Personalization Preferences, allowing users to edit a feed or settings.

MyTimes, in other words, appears to provide much of the functionality that portals like Yahoo began offering circa 1996. If the Times had rolled the feature out in 1995, therefore, who knows where its online presence would be today--probably a good deal larger than the 14 million uniques it currently has. Unfortunately, MyTimes does not seem to offer much that a committed NYTimes.com browser could already find on the site, and its feature set as a start-page almost certainly falls short of those offered by Yahoo, Google, NetVibes, and the dozens of other "My" portals out there, at which most Internet users have already established a presence.

Text ads in feeds receive so little attention from readers that Google, which pursued its own trial, abandoned the experiment. Feed readers, the applications and sites on which geeky internet users scan news items, often do not support the graphical ads which brands prefer, closing off that avenue for a broker such as Feedburner.

So, why would Google pay such a high multiple, about 10 times revenues, for the startup? Probably, for the same reason it has developed Google Analytics: it is another way for Google to tie in independent online publishers. Feedburner provides an array of services to sites, such as email newsletter publishing, and the integration of external news and photos. It is more valuable as a publishing service than an ad broker.

FeedBurner will be working with AOL to manage hundreds of the company's RSS, podcast and video feeds consisting of news, sports and entertainment content. Additionally, all Time Warner properties including HBO, New Line Cinema, Time Inc. and Warner Bros. Entertainment can take advantage of FeedBurner's services. We like open floodgates around here, so long as the servers stay dry.

We'll be providing AOL with detailed analytics about how its content is consumed beyond the AOL Web site -- such as within widgets, in feed readers and on blogs -- to help them accurately measure influence wherever their content is consumed.

But the most significant changes are are under the hood. Instead of presenting a default set of content to new users to start them off, My Yahoo is now analyzing known data about the user (zip code from IP address and the areas of Yahoo that the user visits often) to create a customized version right at signup. So, for example, if the user tends to go to the Yahoo Movies property occasionally, a Yahoo Movies module will be auto added when they create a new My Yahoo account.

Publishers have been asking us to report the number of users that are subscribed to their feeds in Google Reader. This is something we've been wanting to do for a while, but with all the products that use feeds at Google, corralling the data in one place was like herding cats. So herd we did, and as of today, our crawler reports the number of Google users subscribed to the feed. The count includes subscribers from Google Reader and the Google Personalized Homepage, and in the future may include other Google products that support feeds.

Does Google Reader report subscriber counts?

Yes, Google Reader reports subscriber counts when we crawl feeds (within the "User-Agent:" header in HTTP). Currently, these counts include users of both Google Reader and the Google Personalized Homepage, and over time will include subscriptions from other Google properties.

The "User-Agent:" header of our crawler includes the name of our crawler ("FeedFetcher-Google") along with its associated URL, the subscriber count, and a unique 64-bit feed identifier ("feed-id"). You might see multiple requests for the same feed with distinct "feed-id" values. This happens if the same feed is referenced through multiple URLs (for example, because of redirects). In that case, you will need to sum up the subscribers to a feed that have distinct "feed-id" values to determine the total number of Google subscribers to the feed.

Below is an example of the contents of the "User-Agent:" header:

User-Agent: Feedfetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html; 4 subscribers; feed-id=1794595805790851116)

But perhaps more significantly, to develop a mashup, you already needed to be a programmer. Yahoo! Pipes is a first step towards changing all that, creating a programmable web for everyone.

Using the Pipes editor, you can fetch any data source via its RSS, Atom or other XML feed, extract the data you want, combine it with data from another source, apply various built-in filters (sort, unique (with the "ue" this time:-), count, truncate, union, join, as well as user-defined filters), and apply simple programming tools like for loops. In short, it's a good start on the Unix shell for mashups. It can extract dates and locations and what it considers to be "text entities." You can solicit user input and build URL lines to submit to sites. The drag and drop editor lets you view and construct your pipeline, inspecting the data at each step in the process. And of course, you can view and copy any existing pipes, just like you could with shell scripts and later, web pages.

Creating a new Pipe, however, is not for the wary. The mere volume of available options to both expand and narrow down hundreds (or thousands) of pieces of data, combined with the seemingly endless array of (sometimes rather ambiguous) input boxes for each and every module in the pipe, is likely to be daunting for the novice user. Therefore, the service is not likely to be something that the majority of Yahoo!'s everyday users are going to use, but more likely to attract the early-adopting, slightly more technical crowd.

Because of this, Pipes may take off among tech geeks and have enough meme power to remain in the collective consciousness for a while, but may not be able to become a hit trend anytime soon. Content publishers may also become wary of Pipes altering their relationship with the end user by allowing users to manipulate, reformat, and ultimately alter content as they so please. Mishmashing content from all around the web sounds like fun for the user, but some fear that it could decrease brand awareness and reduce webmasters' abilities to track content usage patterns.

The market share of US visits to Bloglines was 3 times greater than Rojo, its nearest competitive web-based feed reader. The chart below shows the traffic trend over the past year for the leading web-based feed readers. You can see that Google Reader has grown lately, but as of the week ending 1/13/07, it had only 1/13 of the market share of visits of Bloglines.

The result is the Reader Trends page, accessed via a link from the "Home" page. For example, it lets me see the spike in read items two days ago (the result of my New Year's resolution of staying on top of my 322 subscriptions). There are also my subscriptions sorted by various criteria, so I can see which I'm having trouble keeping up with. Each subscription has a unsubscribe icon next to it, which I've used for those that I decided were not worth keeping around.

If you have any New Year's resolutions about time management or are a chart geek like me, trends should be useful and fun. You may discover things about your reading habits that you didn't know.

I decided to educate Microsoft about the use of images licensed under Creative Commons and hosted by third-party sites by using the same tactics employed in its own fight against piracy, but with a little twist. I edited the Goatse image to remove depictions of anything that might be considered offensive, and placed the Creative Commons circle logo covering up the focus of the image. The modified image was meant to send a message to readers of the Internet Explorer team's blog that the new picture was out of place, and ensure quick corrective action from Microsoft. I was unsure how many employees in the software division would get the subtle reference to Microsoft's own anti-piracy efforts.

He wasn't pleased that Microsoft used his photo on a commercial site, without attribution. In addition, he said, the use of the photo violated the Flickr terms of service by not linking back to the site.

"Basically they stole one of my photos and put it on their blog," Kennedy said. "I decided to make them very aware of that fact."

Presumably, they are. The updated RSS Team post now concludes with an apology to Kennedy for the improper use, in addition to an apology to readers who saw the second image. What's your opinion of what Kennedy did? Was he justified? Should be interesting to see what people think of this one.

I'm sure that gets everyone 16 and under to laugh, but is that really the best way that Niall could have gotten the image taken down?

I don't think so. Unprofessional, especially for someone who used to work at Microsoft.

Remember Niall, maybe someday this Web 2.0 bubble will end and you might need to go back to a company and look for a job. I know that doesn't seem probable right now, but I've been there.

All versions of Pluck's RSS readers for Internet Explorer, FireFox and Pluck's web edition will be discontinued on 1/5/2007. The RSS Readers have served our community of end users well for several years, but with Pluck's focus in other business areas, the venerable RSS readers are set to be retired from our product line.

Over the next two months, you will have the opportunity to export your RSS feed subscriptions to other RSS readers of your choosing. Please visit the RSS reader support pages for details on how to export your subscriptions and bookmarks for use in other readers.

You have until 1/5/2007 to export your data, after which our servers will be turned off and your data will be deleted. Note that the Pluck RSS readers are not supported for use on the new releases of IE (version 7) and FireFox (version 2).

The Bloglines Browser Plug-In will enable you to use the Bloglines RSS aggregator from your browser and subscribe to RSS feeds with one click. The plug-in will be integrated into the RSS Aggregator functionality of your IE7 browser bar and will be accessible through the RSS Aggregator button in your IE7 browser bar. You will need to register with http://www.bloglines.com to use this plug-in.

Many of these newcomers become true brand loyalists. According to People Group Digital g.m. Fran Hauser, about 70% of PEOPLE.COM traffic comes in at the front door, which means a high share of the audience deliberately returns to the PEOPLE.COM URL rather than tripping into the site sideways, via article links at portals or blogs. "That's a special metric to us,” says Hauser. "It shows how loyal and engaged they are."

Some are downright FANatical. PEOPLE.COM traffic breaks into two distinct browsing types. "Grazers" pop in briefly for a headline check and a celebrity snap or two. "Enthusiasts" hit the site several times a day and rack up more than a dozen page views as they drill into article sections and slideshows. The design tries to capture both mindsets, with headlines and a ticker along the left well and large photo sets inviting you to browse.

Surprisingly, PEOPLE.COM execs are seeing ever more traffic coming from the site's RSS ( Real Simple Syndication ) feeds, which Google and Yahoo users now can add to their personalized home pages. The site gets about 2 million visits a month just from the RSS channel. Likewise, the celebrity blogs are becoming an important funnel of new traffic, if not always the final word. "We talk to a lot of consumers. They will go to the blogs to get a quick fix but we hear that they always come to PEOPLE.COM to see if [the story] is true," says Hauser.

The acquisition gives Six Apart both a feed reader and feed search engine. Rojo will help generate more pageviews, allowing Six Apart to further leverage its newly created advertising network covering LiveJournal Plus accounts and Vox. Six Apart may bundle the Rojo service with its licensed personal blogging service currently powered by TypePad. Six Apart currently licenses TypePad software to companies around the world such as Le Monde in France and Nifty in Japan. Rojo's software could be bundled into these licensing deals or command a higher licensing value for Vox when it is launched and ready for redistribution.

FeedBurner, which powers hundreds of thousands of blog, podcast and mainstream news feeds (including this one), is apparently being blocked by Chinese authorities. Here is a Yoda-esque loose English language translation of William Long's original post. William even used a proxy server to verify that the issue is with the Chinese, not FeedBurner. His subscriber count dropped from over a thousand readers to zero overnight.

As we've seen more types of information get syndicated, and as feeds are becoming used for multiple purposes, we've been growing concerned about the lack of controls on the distribution of personal data, especially through RSS. For example, you may want to allow your friends and family to subscribe to your blog but you'd prefer your posts not show up in search results.

Along these lines, we recently offered a new way to claim your own feeds and indicate whether you want your feed included or excluded from Blog & Feed search on Ask.com and Bloglines (for more information, read the blog post announcing our Publisher Tools). But this method only solves the issue at Bloglines and Ask.com, and it doesn't address user-created (as opposed to publisher-created) feeds, like flickr feeds, which can't be claimed. Clearly, there is a need for an industry-wide solution.

As a result, we are proposing (and have implemented) an RSS and ATOM extension that allows publishers to indicate the distribution restrictions of a feed. Setting the access restriction to 'deny' will indicate the feed should not be re-distributed. In Bloglines, we'll use this to prevent the display of the feed information or posts in search results or any other public venue. If other readers and aggregators use the information in the same way, and publishers of feeds, including services that let users create feeds, implement this standard, we could make significant progress toward making feeds truly safe for non-public information. We think that's a pretty cool idea.

Feedster, Inc., the leader in search and syndication of dynamic content, has announced today that Tyler Goldman will join its Board of Directors and become acting president. Mr. Goldman was previously Senior VP of Corporate & Business Development at Movielink, and founder and CEO of Broadband Sports, Inc. Former president, Chris Redlitz, left to pursue interests in earlier stage companies.

"Feedster is well positioned to expand its leadership in search and syndication." said Mr. Goldman. "With 41 million blogs and feeds being searched dynamically, Feedster provides consumers with the best way to leverage the constant flow of information that is being published on the web. Feedster is well recognized by the technology community as the leading search and syndication engine for dynamic web-published content, including blogs, news and podcasts, and is in the process of expanding this leadership position in newly emerging areas like images and video. As millions of users, publishers and other web-based entities continually generate a vast amount of dynamic content Feedster provides a comprehensive platform to search and syndicate content that is most relevant and timely."

We integrate directly with MySpace. All you need is a MySpace profile and NooZ does the rest. We get your photo, your display name, and automatically connect you to your friends. (Because of this, you must have a MySpace profile to use NooZ.)

We put a NooZ ticker on your MySpace profile. This is a flash widget that can display the latest item from ANY page on NooZ, such as the items you vote for, or any category, or even any RSS or Atom feed.

We let you see what your MySpace friends are reading. You can quickly check out items your MySpace friends submitted or voted for, both on NooZ.com and in a widget.

But there's a real difference between what Share Your OPML is doing and other ranking systems. SYO is completely objective and shows exactly what content people are actually reading right now. Other ranking systems are either subjective, or forced to look at either different data (Technorati looks at links) or only data specific to their users (Bloglines ranks blogs based on subscriber numbers on Bloglines). Over time, SYO can become a true "long tail" recommendation engine if a wide swath of the users out there are willing to upload their OPML feed. And they are only a couple of steps away from being there.

SYO needs more users. My guess is a few thousand have already uploaded their reading lists, but it will take a lot more before the data is really reflective of what most people are reading. To do this, SYO needs to add more value than it currently does for users. New features have been rolling out over time that help do this. Since the last time I looked, SYO has added a top podcast list and a feed reader to the mix.

We'll remove any feed publisher from our system that doesn't want to play and we'll simply notify our users, when they attempt to create a feedpass, what that publisher's stance is on the matter.

There's a top 100 list of the most popular feeds which could become the definitive top 100 list once there is a statistically relevant number of users (subject to SYO successfully controlling spam). You can also see other users that have similar reading habits as you (it’s called “subscriptions like mine”). Based on this last feature, John Tropea, Robert Scoble and Dave Winer are my closest matches. I may find other interesting feeds by perusing their lists.

Yesterday, we announced that Newsweek, one of the country's leading weekly news magazines had launched a privately-branded RSS aggregator through NewsGator Private Label Hosted Solution. The site has been in public beta for several days, and we're seeing a large contingent of their readers using the service on a daily basis. We host private label readers for a number of publishers, media companies, and content providers, and each one has a slightly different twist in terms of the interface they provide to site visitors. Newsweek is no exception. They have a very simple and clean look and feel, and it takes only one a few clicks to add feeds to the personalized reader. There's no sign-up process, an account is created the first time you access the application and if your computer allows cookies, you don't have to sign-in each time you return.

://URLFAN is an evolving experiment designed to discover what websites the blogosphere is discussing all in real time. It does this by cultivating the content of thousands of RSS feeds and parsing billions of pieces of information.

Now every website owner can see who's talking about their site in real time and how they compare to every other site on the Internet. There are many sites designed to rank the "traffic" of a website, such as Alexa, however ://URLFAN is different. We rank sites according to their popularity in the fast moving and growing world of RSS feeds.

Unlike Alexa, there is no approximating in our ranking system since we're using concrete data to generate the results. And the longer we're able to gather data the more accurate the system will become. We hope this will provide publishers with a useful tool in tracking their sites and how their content is referenced by other websites.

Members can already use RSS to keep an eye on the Announcement Board, the eBay Discussion Boards, or listings from specific eBay Stores. This week we're adding RSS support to our eBay Search pages. With this enhancement you can create a custom RSS feed that will deliver the results of your eBay Search to you via any RSS reader. Since we are integrating the RSS support with our Advanced Search pages, you'll have complete control over how you narrow down your search.

To subscribe to a RSS feed, you'll need an RSS reader or aggregator to gather and view the updates. Several free and commercial RSS readers are available, and some examples can be seen here (provided by dmoz.org). Once you have an RSS reader, simply go to the bottom of any RSS-enabled page you are interested in, click on the RSS button, copy the URL from the page that opens, and paste it into your reader to display the content in RSS.

RSS continues to penetrate the mainstream market, as companies like eBay educate their users to the value of search syndication. These actions continue to validate the collective cause of what many start ups have been pushing for some time now-Feedster included.

On the right hand menu bar, below our prospects, you'll now find 'Recommended Reading'. This is a list of the most recent articles I've marked with a 'star' in Google Reader, the RSS reader I use. I'll be sure in future to mark the items I think are worth reading with a star, and they'll turn up on the right hand menu bar automatically. You can click the links to read the original articles, or follow a separate link to the home page of the website the article came from.

The navigation of content leads the reader to a subdomain of wireless-watch.com, rather than to the creator's blog. Here are some screenshot examples with the URL magnified and highlighted. It's a bit blurry from magnification, but the urls can be discerned.

"The current version of the site is online at the link below; it is NOT publicly available and will not be so until **** -- and then only with content provided by contributors who have given us authorization. We will not, at any time, republish any content for which we do not have a duly signed agreement from the original contributor."

"In other words, if you do not wish to join the W-W.Com platform, any and all content from your RSS feed that we have cached during our test and trial phase will be deleted (with no hard feelings from us!) before the public launch so as not to violate your copyright."

Considering our obvious concern regarding privacy and copyright contained therein, any neutral evaluation of the materials (including the required Community Agreement contract) would reasonably conclude that due diligence was clearly demonstrated in the process we have taken.

Aside from e-mail, RSS also plays a major role in Windows Live Mail Desktop. The software can serve as a complete RSS reader, enabling users to organize subscriptions using folders, instantly see unread items, and view items in a built-in preview pane.

Users can also click on an RSS item and immediately blog about it using the new "Blog It!" feature.

"Blogging and RSS looks like they're here to stay and phishing is more dangerous than ever. Now is the time to add life back into my favorite free email client and we're injecting a large dose of adrenaline to kick things back up," says Live Mail Desktop developer Lei Gong.

Other improvements being added to the client according to Gong include a redesigned user interface, emoticon and inline spell checking, and automatic syncing with Hotmail contacts.

That's a question I always wonder about and never seem to know the answer to. I'm subscribed to around 50 different feeds on the basis that it'll guarantee something worth reading each day, leaving it up to me to wade through things that don't interest me to get to the good stuff. Some of those feeds will only provide new content every two or three days, some will cough up ten or twelve articles per day. Since no technology is yet good enough at sorting the wheat from the chaff, it still leaves a burden on me to find needles in my RSS haystack.

Maybe 50 is too many, then. Or is it too few? Should I saturate myself with RSS feeds from every blog I've ever thought looked worthwhile, and just allow myself ten minutes to pick my way down a list of articles each day, picking out the quality? Or should I accept that some good articles will sink to the bottom, and just pick up the top articles in my RSS reader whenever I get the chance? Or should I only have 10 or 15 feeds, so that I never miss a thing from sites I know I'll love? But can you think of a site whose posts you know - one hundred per cent - you'll read each time? There aren't that many. I personally would rather pick and choose from a wide variety than rely on a shortlist to constantly come good for me. The alternative is to sit through the bland stuff in the hope that it'll expand my knowledge if nothing else, but that seems hardly the point of RSS.

In the next iteration/stepping stone of our website, a la January...Feedster will support the Mozilla inspired icon you see here. Specifically we'll be using the set of icons developed by Matt Brett. Matt was good enough to develop a set of Photoshop and EPS files for communal use.

We're proud to say that Bloglines has experienced tremendous growth, more than tripling subscribers, feeds and articles in less than a year. On January 5th we topped 1 billion articles and we're currently pulling in new articles at a rate of 3-4 million per day. For those number naysayers out there, keep in mind that we only keep articles from feeds that users have subscribed to (which also keeps our splog count lean). For these reasons, we consider ours to be the highest quality blogosphere index that exists.

Awareness of RSS is quite low among Internet users. 12% of users are aware of RSS, and 4% have knowingly used RSS.

27% of Internet users consume RSS syndicated content on personalized start pages (e.g., My Yahoo!, My MSN) without knowing that RSS is the enabling technology.

28% of Internet users are aware of podcasting, but only 2% currently subscribe to podcasts.

Even tech-savvy "Aware RSS Users" prefer to access RSS feeds via user-friendly, browser based experiences (e.g., My Yahoo!, Firefox, My MSN).

In the survey, respondents who were unaware of RSS and who use a personalized start page supporting RSS feeds were asked to select the items displayed on their page. Customers who selected known RSS content feeds were categorized as "RSS Unaware users."

View a blog's profile (here's Lifehacker) which includes related sites and tags. See posts which link to that site ala Technorati (here's Lifehacker's mentions). Create a list of favorites, tag' em, surf other people's tags, and see posts from all your favorite sites in a handy digest (here's Lifehacker's digest and my personal digest.) And more, and more, and more…

I ain’t gonna pretend I have any kind of objectivity here. I was a developer on Kinja for the first year and a half of its life. While I haven’t checked code into the Kinja repository since February, my heart’s busting with pride to see the vision we talked over and over come to life. Congratulations, Kinja team! *clinks glasses*

Today I launched my blog ... WebProBlog. It's focus is on eBusiness strategies and trends from my perspective as CEO of iEntry, Inc. and as a early internet entrepreneur. Frequent topics will include internet advertising, email marketing, search engines, eBusiness strategies and commentary on news we cover at WebProNews.

We have been involved with blogs for quite a while here at iEntry. I guess it's about time I jumped into the blogger mix myself. What really inspired me were the re-publishing relationships we started approximately 1 year ago. This has been a feature that has been very popular with our WebProNews readers.

You know how it works. You're sitting at your terminal, minding your own business, when the Powers That Be rush in shouting some new term. "Blogs!" they yell, "Blooooggggsss! We must have a blog!" while wildly waving some business magazine article in your face. Erk.

While you don't have much of a choice in the matter, the fact is that many hot new technologies aren't always appropriate for everyone. While they may seem hip and get written about with breathless abandon by business magazines, not all new trends are worthwhile.

They can often turn into giant time-sucks or, worse yet, end up mouldering on the server, starved for the content they need to keep going, making the company look worse by the day as the "last updated" date ages ungracefully.

Nielsen//NetRatings found that the top 50 blogging and blog-related sites grew in popularity 31 per cent to attract 29.3m unique visitors during July 2005 as compared to the beginning of this year.

Leading the way, MSN Spaces was found to be ranked number one in year-to-date unique audience growth with a 947 per cent increase on nearly 3.3m visitors in July. Fark.com and Blogger ranked second and third with 63 per cent and 45 per cent unique audience growth, respectively.

"We have just scratched the surface of RSS integration with a browser and e-mail. We made it easier to navigate and get feeds, but publishing and improving RSS usability will be an ongoing challenge," Hofmann said. "Our researchers are looking at new ideas now, but we aren't ready to talk about it now. " Open source development is about sharing, but just not everything at once. He characterized the efforts of the Mozilla Foundation as evolutionary, "grinding out small improvements."

The variation among these feeds is significant. The most popular is Slashdot, with 37,400 active subscribers. Meanwhile, sites with only 1 current subscriber include Haag's Pop Podium and Justin's Guide to Everything, where the only subscriber is me. I have no idea who Justin is but thought he would appreciate the audience. (Maybe people will start a new game called Bloglineswhacking to find feeds with only one subscriber?)

It's also interesting to note that these feeds are very prolific and getting more so everyday: In June we surpassed 500 million articles in the Bloglines feed index, and in the next few days we'll cross the 600 million mark. We're adding more than 2 million new articles every day. There's no question that the blogosphere and other sources of feed content are the fastest growing segment of new content on the web.

No participant understood the mechanisms associated with RSS/subscribing to a blog -- not even the minority familiar with the term "RSS."

Few participants even recognized that they were on an actual blog -- and once they did, had a very different reaction to the information presented.

A minority of participants understood how to navigate within the blog itself -- with most being confused by areas for recent posts, categories, trackbacks and even the comments and archives functions.

Catalyst's conclusions: broad comprehension is fairly far away – and better design and terminology are essential. All those tested were optimistic about blogs following the test, with many expressing interest or enthusiasm for what had been a new experience. However, few felt that the presentation of functionality and navigation was intuitive, and many wondered why more effort had not been put into education.

Whoever figures out how to communicate these terms, clearly and intuitively, to the hundreds of millions of Websurfers who don't blog stands to make a mint.

Microsoft's Dean Hachamovitz right now is on stage at Gnomedex. He basically announced widespread support for RSS in Longhorn and Internet Explorer 7.0. This includes: 1) improving basic RSS experiences for users, 2) RSS tools that empower developers to RSS-enable applications, and 3) adding new extensions to RSS that broaden it (all available via Creative Commons). I was pre-briefed earlier this week, however, Scoble just told me there's a full video demo posted on Channel9.

In Stiennon's opinion, his most distressing prediction is that spyware will latch onto RSS (Real Simple Syndication) as a way to distribute ad- and spy-style software.

"I'm extremely concerned about this," said Stiennon. "Already we're seeing marketers look to RSS. A recent list by marketing types on why RSS is better than e-mail, for example, had 'no more annoying complaints about spam' at number 8. Where marketers go, adware and spyware writers follow."

Another nasty possibility, said Stiennon, is that a vulnerability will be found in one of the big blogging services. "If a spyware writer finds a way to inject code into a blogging site -- which could take the form of a SOAP object -- most likely through a future vulnerability in Internet Explorer 7, then everyone who subscribes to that service's blog RSS feeds is gonna get infected." Such an attack could be massive, and because of the automated nature of RSS, extremely fast-acting.

The day InfoWorld's top news RSS feed received more requests than our home page, I started thinking a frightening thought: RSS is doing to the Web today what the Web has been doing to print for the last several years. We have disintermediated our Web site by offering our news in an easier to access format...again. Just as the Web ultimately created more opportunity rather than less, RSS will open up some new doors for the media business. What's behind those doors may even become more profound than what we're doing with traditional online media properties today. But the ghost in the closet is a bit scary, probably big, and definitely ugly on first glance.

The idea, in brief, is that instead of being herded into walled gardens, such as eBay, the public will be able to use new structural and organizational tools to form into their own herds. People buying and selling, say, baseball cards, would simply find each other. EBay et al would no longer monopolize their users' data. Instead, they would have to build their business on providing services, such as payments and seller ratings.

Starting this summer, all paying NewsGator subscribers will get FeedDemon as part of their subscription packages at no additional charge. In addition, all FeedDemon and TopStyle customers will get a free 2-year NewsGator business subscription, which will include free updates of both NewsGator Outlook edition and FeedDemon.

Given RSS's increasing popularity among online publishers, bloggers and marketers, there's a lot of buzz on its potential to reach millions of interested consumers directly through opt-in feeds to consumers' RSS readers of choice.

However, "potential" is the key word.

RSS lacks hard numbers of almost any kind, making it impossible to base a business case for relying on it as a publishing or marketing tool... at this time.

And yet otherwise sensible marketers and publishers are talking about replacing email with RSS offerings (asking readers to choose format which they'd like to get info in) -- and hundreds of bloggers have chosen to *only* offer RSS feeds instead of an accompanying email alert.

Before becoming blogging guru to the academic elite, Winer founded and was chief executive of Millbrae, Calif.-based UserLand Software, which specializes in content-publishing tools and services. He wrote or contributed to a number of relevant specifications, including SOAP, XML-RPC, RSS and OPML. He is perhaps best known for launching Scripting News, one of the Internet's longest-running Web logs.