A new report from the feed publisher Feedburner (one of my favorite service providers) illustrates the growing adoption of RSS beyond a mere means to subscribe to a blog’s updates. (See my Intro to RSS Syndication if you need some basics.) The venn diagram below illustrates the basic point of the report, titled “Feed for Thought” but readers may be interested in clicking through to read the finer points and interesting discussion in the comments section.

Interesting things to note:

• “Watchlists” means searches subscribed to by RSS, one of my favorite uses of the medium.
• “Commercial Publishers” means, in large part, corporate news sites with or without RSS feeds. Wether this diagram claims more extensive adoption in that sector or not was argued in the original post’s comments section.
• “Blogs” here signifies what percentage of blogs publish RSS feeds. If you are in the substantial portion outside of that group, I would highly recomend changing that. But more importantly, if you are using a tool like WordPress, Movable Type, Typepad or Blogger and using only their RSS feed then I would urge you to utilize a Feedburner feed instead!

I use Feedburner itself for many things and I certainly never publish an RSS feed without running it through their services. It’s high points for me are that it offers extensive analytics on number of subscribers, method of subscription and an automatic pinging service to tell systems like Technorati and Bloglines that you have new content to be indexed.

In related news elsewhere, Infoworld’s John Udell wrote this morning about the powerful scalability of XML, the foundation of RSS. He argues that the balance is shifting away from RSS being a tool that the public uses mostly for reading and towards increased mass adoption of RSS for publishing our own content. He says that XML is actually better for scalability and accurate searching than the traditional database systems like Oracle or SQL Server.

This will only become more evident when Microsoft includes extensive use of RSS into it’s upcoming Windows Vista operating system. But why wait for that to get your hands dirty with this wonderful new tool? Most likely Microsoft’s utilization of RSS will not be nearly as useful as those made possible allready by services focused on RSS. If I had a nickle for everyone who told me a year ago, “I don’t want to learn about RSS now, I’ll just wait until the Mac Tiger OS X comes out with RSS included…” Now that it’s here, who uses it? This tool deserves to be used as a primary, flexable mechanism for communication, not with the limited functionality that browser-based support for RSS typically means.

Related: My del.icio.us archive on RSS

Technorati Tags: RSS, Feedburner, adoption, browser, scalability, multimedia