On RSS

I used to be an RSS junkie. But, aside from a few bad eggs like BusinessInsider, whose pages are so heavy they bring the latest Macs to their knees on render times, in the past couple of years I've been visiting sites more often. RSS has been, and will likely always be, a niche.

There's not much recent data on RSS usage overall, but if you look back a couple of years it's clear RSS never achieved the sort of mainstream adoption it could have. I don't know why this is, but I do know most people I know who aren't readers of tech sites don't give a shit about RSS.

Personally I've been going to full sites because the design is important to me, not just a data dump of the day's chronological stories.

Some fun reading on RSS adoption here, here and here. No wonder Apple dropped it from Safari. Although I do wish it could read OPML or RSS files. Safari should be at home reading any markup, really, but that's another story.