RSS and business

Do you use RSS feeds? I do, in various ways. They feed my content (such as this posting) to any web page of mine that I choose. They arrive in my reader (to be read or ignored, depending upon time). They also trigger emails to warn me of changes and some even pop up on my screen. One feed gets turned into voice and podcasted. But do you use RSS?

I must admit most people around me - socially - go blank. Even some people at work. And I work in IT. They may use it but the name escapes them. It's just how some things work. And you don't always take an interest in the how, just the what.

So it surprises me that InfoWorld can report that "In fact, a recent Pew Internet Foundation survey found nearly one in three individuals consumes RSS feeds. But for enterprises, the most telling response was that 63 percent of these RSS users subscribe to work-related feeds."

The claim of one in 3 "individuals" surprises me. Maybe these are unusually IT-aware individuals. I'd personally be surprised if 1 in 3 individuals in the street had even heard of RSS. Maybe 1 in 10 - and that's a big maybe. But once you do know what it is and what it does it's not a surprise that people find it useful. That 63% of actual feed users use RSS for work purposes is probably about right - but I'd love to see the data!