If you don’t know about Share your OPML! yet, go and check it.
The purpose of this site is to gather a community of subscription lists, in OPML format, and aggregate them in interesting ways.
Next to adding your own subscription list you can check check Top 100 RSS feeds, Pictures from the Top 100 and Subscription lists for authors of the Top 100.
I always find personal views more interesting than aggregations, so my favourites are:
- Other People’s Feeds – select a name to view subscriptions by someone, login is required (for example my subscriptions)
- Who Subscribes? – find out who subscribes to a RSS feed (for example, who reads my weblog via RSS)
Although the last one shows only subscribers who shared their subscription lists it adds a lot of value providing more insight about our audiences.
In most of the cases weblog RSS readers are not as visible as weblog page readers: usual counters show only web-page visitors, not everyone can access server-based statistics to see RSS traffic and even having this access it’s not easy to estimate numbers of RSS subscribers. Similar problem exist in on-line communities: web-pages traffic is easy to count, but nobody knows how many people lurk via e-mail subscriptions.
So, even being far from perfect Who Subscribes? uncovers the hidden part of weblog reading iceberg. For me the best thing of it is discovering names of people I never knew were reading my weblog.
See also: RSS vs. browser for weblog reading and more on blog reading
Tags: blog ecosystem, blog reading, blog research, communities, RSSArchived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/01/18.html#a903; comments are here.