Has RSS come of age? Or is it
still just for Geeks? Let's consider the evidence...
In the last month
alone, the Bitwise RSS feed has been accessed more
than 38,000 times. Bearing
in mind that Bitwise went online for the first time just
three months ago, the popularity of our feed might lead
you to conclude that RSS is now a widely used mainstream
technology.
On the other hand, I also run a web site devoted to
1980s
pop music (well, we all have our little eccentricities).
This too has an RSS feed. The site is popular, but its
feed isn’t. In fact, in the last month its feed
has been accessed just 175 times. This isn’t the
only interesting statistical difference between the two
sites. Consider the browsers and operating systems which
people use. My Control Panel shows me that less than
half of Bitwise visitors are using Internet Explorer:
29.8% use Firefox compared to 43.9% using IE. But on
the 80s music site a massive 81.7% of visitors use IE
and just 9.3% use Firefox.
It’s a similar story with operating systems.
On the ‘80s music site, 91.3% use Windows, 5.7%
use a Mac and an insignificant 0.4% user Linux. On Bitwise,
on the other hand, 84.6% of visitors use Windows, 3.7%
use Linux and only 2.9% use a Mac.
Now, before rushing
to draw too many conclusions from these statistics,
it’s
worth bearing in mind that these are just two sites out
of countless thousands and may, I suppose, be quite untypical.
Moreover, the percentages shown in my Control Panel aren’t
exact. Some browsers, for example, can deliberately adopt
alternative ‘browser
identities’ which may fool the Control Panel.
All the same, if we assume that the statistics are ‘more
or less’ accurate, they reveal some interesting
trends. First, in spite of much criticism of the weaknesses
of Internet Explorer over the past couple of years, this
clearly remains by far the dominant browser. Firefox
makes a respectable showing in second place on Bitwise,
but is much less frequently used by visitors to my 80s
site. The difference in the take-up of RSS is even more
remarkable. A great many Bitwise readers have subscribed
to our feed whereas hardly anyone has subscribed on my
80s site. I think it is reasonable to suppose that the
Bitwise readership is a good deal more technically sophisticated
than the average 1980s pop music fan (though the two
categories are not mutually exclusive). I am led to conclude,
therefore, that techy-types are more likely than non-techies
to adopt new technologies such as RSS and ‘alternative’ applications
(such as Firefox).
As so often in the past, it may be that the Internet-using
world at large only finally ‘discovers’ new
technologies when Microsoft ‘introduces’ them.
That will happen when RSS features are added to the forthcoming
release of Internet Explorer. Meanwhile, for those of
you who haven’t yet discovered RSS, our special
feature this month provides a simple introduction
to RSS and Atom and a five
minute guide to subscribing to
an RSS feed. Those of you who are already RSS-enabled
may like to consider some of the free or inexpensive
RSS
reader and generator applications
currently available.
One other, perhaps surprising. statistic from the Bitwise
Control Panel is the one relating to the usage of Linux.
I am not myself a Linux user but, over the years, I have
read so much about the merits of Linux both in magazines
and on the Internet that I had assumed that the Linux
OS must, by now, have made a fairly large number of converts.
All I can say is that, if so, they don’t seem to
be visiting Bitwise. Given all the proselytizing for
Linux, can it really be true that just 3.7% of our readers
have Linux installed (while less than half of one
percent of Linux users visit my 80s site)?
Or is this abysmally low figure just part of a devious
Microsoft conspiracy to convince us that, in spite of
all the brouhaha, Linux is not a serious threat to Windows
after all?
No, that’s one conspiracy theory I think we can
safely throw out. After all, Bitwise is hosted on Linux….
(For more views on Linux, see this month's Bytegeist).
Huw Collingbourne
(Editor)
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