RSS Feeds Are For Geeks

I noticed something completely random today: the RSS feeds I subscribe to (through Bloglines) with the most subscribers are mostly websites that are kind of geeky (ok, really geeky). The "Top 10" feeds I subscribe to, in terms of subscribers, are:

Site	# Subscribers
Slashdot	103,507
Dilbert	90,229
BBC News	86,447
Engadget	74,694
Boing Boing	62,900
CNET News	42,454
Techdirt	40,943
Wired Top Stories	26,613
Lifehacker	19,834
ESPN.com	16,730

Of those, one may argue that the BBC news feed isn't "just for dorks," and neither is the ESPN.com feed, though the rest really do seem to have the geek appeal. The only other feed I subscribe to with greater than 10,000 subscribers is kottke.org.

I assume that this is because it's the geeks who really use RSS feeds to begin with. Most of the "general public" using the internet are probably going to only a few sites: news sites, YouTube, and email sites. It's us dorks, more interested in rapid information access, who find the benefit of RSS feeds, so it's natural that sites that cater to dorks (or geeky interests) are more popular in the feedreaders. I wonder what other readers, such as the Google Reader (which I am not a fan of), show.