Sunday, November 18, 2007

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.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

more interested in rapid information access

Or at least in more efficient filtering and streamlining of said information. All part of the annoyingly efficient relevancy engine.