InfoWorld RSS requests top their home page requests
The rise of RSS as a new way of aggregating multiple sources of information continues unabated. Today, Chad Dickerson reports here that requests to InfoWorld's Top News RSS feed have topped requests for the normal InfoWorld home page. OK - so it's a geeky audience by definition, but still - probably a significant leading indicator.
During the business day, we track hour-to-hour performance (using a combination of shell scripts and Analog) and in any given hour, about 8 of our top 10 most requested files are RSS files. The actual numbers are proprietary, of course, but I can say that we have seen significant growth in overall RSS requests just in the past several weeks.
An interesting phenomenon to be sure, even though this is sort-of a biased measurement because Infoworld's main page is perfectly useless.
The next year will see RSS/RDF/Atom aggregation tools become more sophisticated and flashy. Already, most weblogs are becoming little personal portals by integrating feeds and sharing APIs with social software "tools" like Tribe, Orkut, & Flickr.