There are nowhere near the amount of webmasters using RSS that there should be. There is more exposure about RSS than there has ever been but take up of RSS still seems to be slow. I think the main reason for this is the lack of understanding of how to implement an RSS feed.

I have been blogging at http://blogtonomy.com/ for two weeks now, thats two weeks today in fact and my Feedburner stats tell me I have a total of nine subscribers to my RSS feed. Thats not bad considering I did not activate my RSS feed straight away. These subscribers are made aware of updates to my sites without having to visit my site. Why would you want to make your readers visit your site if it hasnt changed.

One of my missions as a webmasters has been to promote RSS to webmasters to let them know that it can be used as an additional channel to communicate with their visitors. I believe it fills a gap that email is failing to do because of the vast amount of spam that is out there. In fact I only use email as a means of making contact with people, email is personal and should not be invaded. You should not have to give out your email address all the time.

RSS is a good medium for publishing newsletters, updates and news. The sorts of things that are not specific to an individual but are relevant to groups. I would compare RSS to being more like a newspaper where as email is more like a letter you would expect to get from a friend or relative.

By all means I am an advocate of RSS and have been promoting it over at http://newsniche.com/ because of the lack of enthusiasm or maybe the confusion when it comes to RSS. The use of RSS may not become as widely used as email but it will grow in popularity, especially with the interest shown recently from the likes of MSN and Yahoo. No doubt Google will join in soon.