RSS Awareness Day

Apr 13, 2008 by Matt | Posted in General 3 Comments

Feedburner recently reported that they track around 60 million RSS subscribers. Even if we bump that number to 70 million RSS users (counting people that use RSS with other applications or platforms) this would still convert to a meager 5,4% of the Internet users around the world, as of today. (Daily Blog Tips)

That’s not good, is it? 95% of web users still visit sites manually every day, checking the same sites every day for updates. With RSS, you can, at a glance, see if a site has been updated, without visiting it by hand. The web comes to you, instead of you going to the web. It’s time to spread RSS.

RSS Awareness Day is Daniel Scocco’s latest crackpot brilliant idea to increase his subscriber count, er, improve the internet.

Really, you don’t even have to link to Daily Blog Tips to participate. Daniel is working on a site for the event over at rssday.org.

The goal is to get as many people using RSS as possible, so the event works like this:

  1. There is a mini-contest-thing to help promote the event. There will be some random drawings from the pool of bloggers who help get the word out about RSS Awareness Day. Blog about it, use one of the buttons/banners that are currently in the works, etc.
  2. On May 1st, participants blog about RSS. “You can just mention that it is the RSS Awareness Day and link to some RSS resources, or you can explain what RSS is and teach your readers how they can make the most out of RSS.”

I have some plans evolving for May 1st, though they’re a little vague at the moment. Since a lot of you already know what RSS is, I can’t just write a post explaining what RSS is. I’m planning on planning something a bit more interesting.

What can you do on May 1st?

  • Educate your readers. I recommend the excellent video RSS in Plain English. Write a little about how RSS can benefit them, and add the YouTube video to the post. Then tell them to subscribe to your feed.
  • Just say “today is RSS awareness day.” (Sure, be boring…)
  • Post a big RSS icon, and say “subscribe to my feed if you haven’t already.” Be sure to put a link to a place that says what RSS is.
  • Link to some RSS resources.
  • Edit your stylesheet and make your blog orange. Be sure to write a post saying why your blog is orange, though. (Orange can look good if it’s done right.)

Have fun, do whatever you want for May 1st, so long has it has some sort of RSS theme to it.