Celebrating RSS Day
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May 1st is RSS Day. That’s what the good people over at Daily Blog Tips initiated in hopes of educating people about RSS. So how or why did this all come about? An excerpt from the official RSS Day site explains it best:
Back in 2005 5% of the Internet users said they were using RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is posted online (according to the Pew Internet Project).
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.
If you have a blog or website, help us spread the word by writing about the RSS Awareness Day or by using one of the badges and banners below. You don’t need to link back here (although you can). As long as you help to raise the awareness about RSS we are happy!
To find out more about RSS, we encourage you to visit RSS Day where they have a video and images to explain it to you in a very easy to understand format.
On our part, we also have a page explaining RSS so if you need more information, you can always visit it.
So go out and spread the word on RSS Day. Tell your friends about RSS. Show them the link explaining it. Twitter about it. Put it as your status on Facebook or MSN Messenger or whatever instant messenger it is that you are using.
And while you are at it, be sure to sign up for our RSS feeds if you have done so. We have a few feeds depending on what you like:
Via RSS
Via Email
In case you are wondering, Posts (Full) means that you will get the full post as it were published on My Today Screen.
Posts (Partial) means you would only get the part of the post before the break.
Comments means you are subscribing to a feed of all the comments made on the site.
Still have questions on RSS? Leave them in the comments below. Happy RSS Day!
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Any recommendations on a good free RSS reader for Windows Mobile VGA devices. Currently using pRSSreader but would like to try other free alternatives.
You could try NewsGator’s free reader though you must be using NewsGator’s (free) service. Or you could just access the mobile Google Reader which is what I do.
Can any of the two readers you recommended cache the feeds and images for offline browsing?
Google Reader Mobile is an online service which does not allow cache at the moment though that might change in the future with Google Gears Mobile.
NewsGator does allow for offline viewing, just like pRSSreader.
The two best are NewsBreak and Spb Insight. Though I am afraid neither are free, they do both offer substantial trial periods.
Doug
I gave Spb Insight a shot but disliked the sometimes poor performance that would sometimes cause my O2 Flame to not respond for a while. I am uninstalling the software today after it froze my Flame today this morning. I was forced me to reboot and ended losing all of the text messages I sent and received this morning. What horrible programming.
NewsBreak’s policy with images is a dealbreaker for me.
I don’t know if I’ll go back to using pRSSreader. The cache manager is broken — now matter how many times I manually clear the cache, it still occupies 1+ GB of data in my memory card — and the HTML parsing is slow. Sometimes it seems like it is re-downloading all of the images again.
Well, let us know what you end up picking.
Doug