Tapping the Feed: in search of an RSS Money Trail

摘要

A year ago I would have said that the XML-based RSS (real simple syndication) protocol is still way too geeky for mainstream users. Even now, when most of us hit one of those orange "subscribe" buttons at a site we get a screen of cryptic code for RSS or Atom (a related protocol) that looks more like a browser error than the hot new way of pulling in a publisher's content updates. In just the last few months, however, RSS has taken aim at mainstream use and is beginning to hit its target. Yahoo! now makes these feeds available for easy integration in its My Yahoo! pages. Mozilla's very popular Firefox browser has a convenient RSS reader built in. And the number of feeds and users has risen exponentially. "In the existing feeds we manage, the base of subscribers grows about 1% to 1.5% a day," says Dick Costolo, company founder and CEO, FeedBurner, which provides metrics and distribution for 25,000 RSS feeds.