"Yesteday I got about double my usual number of hits and I ahve no idea why. I have also noticed that nobody really links to me. I just get lots of hits from Google. I know some people are reading my RSS feed... I just wish I knew how many. I actually have the code laying aroudn that would allow me to figure that out. Maybe I should implement it." [weblog.masukomi.org]

Yes, YES, and YES!! Us non-programmers would be eternally grateful.  :-)

"Would you believe that I only just found this RCS feature? How? Jenny linked to Phil Wolff. In his sidebar he links to it." [The Peanut Gallery]

I would believe it because I didn't notice it at all! But it's so much fun, I added mine on the right-hand side. Of course, I don't really understand where these numbers are coming from (or these).

Is there any way for me to tell how many aggregators are subscribed to my channel? I know that Dave says, "Jon Udell's last column for BYTE, Personal RSS Aggregators, is rising through the ranks on Daypop. This is good to see. Unlike weblogs, aggregators don't leave much of a visible trail to follow."

Is that a no?

RSS Auto-discovery

"Matt Griffith: Do any RSS aggregators use the HTML link element? [via Joe Gregorio: Ideas, Ideas, Ideas]

This sounds like a fantastic idea. Specifying the location of your RSS feed in a standard machine-readable format would solve a real problem. And as far as I can tell, it's actually using HTML the way it was intended. (The specification doesn't mention RSS explicitly; it just open-endedly says that you can use the link tag to designate substitute versions for the document in which the link occurs. This would certainly seem to qualify.)

The only thing I would add is a title:

<link rel="alternate" type="text/xml" title="XML" href="http://diveintomark.org/xml/rss.xml">

Lynx renders the title as a link to the referenced document. You can (and should) use the same technique to link to print-friendly pages, too. And translations, if the page is available in multiple languages." [dive into mark]

Mass-Appealing, And Sometimes Appalling

"It has become my annual rite of spring -- surfing high-traffic, little-known Web sites to see what other folks are doing online that I'm not. For the third year in a row, I spent several days exploring niche Web sites to get a feel for where people are hanging out besides big portals like Yahoo....

Despite the death of many commercial Web sites, hundreds continue to attract big traffic. Media Metrix changed the way it counts site traffic last October, so the firm can't say exactly how many sites are drawing more than 1 million visitors this year compared with last spring, when about 640 sites earned that distinction. But the company says the number of sites people typically visit in a month jumped 25 percent last year. The average Internet user went to 71 sites from home in February, vs. 57 a year earlier....

Among the innovations gaining steam this year is Web logs, a personal publishing format millions of people are using to post their daily thoughts and tirades. One site offering free Web logging software, LiveJournal.com, drew more than a million visitors in April, while Blogspot.com, another, pulled in more than 600,000." [WashTech]

The overall theme of the article is that web surfers are visiting more sites than ever. For those using news aggregators, the characterization is a little different, but an informal poll (and a not-very-scientific one I'm conducting right now) show that these folks read even more sites on average.

Imagine when the two trends meet. When news aggregators are as easy to use as Microsoft Word, they'll become more mainstream. (Please don't throw any stones for that example, because I already know what you're going to say. But even my daughter can use it so it has some validity as an example.)

Would you rather have someone visit your site or read your content? It depends on your mission and goals, although any site interested in disseminating content will need to shift to be available in aggregators.

"Yet again LinkSys has made me a happy customer.  I keep hearing about Wifi from people and I'm jealous of Natrak who can blog from his deck so I took the plunge. I've even been told: "I know all about it , even my gf has WiFi" by a reader.  Clearly my "geek street cred" was being threatened.  A quick trip to my favorite mail order place, www.pcconnection.com, a wireless PCMCIA card and a WiFi hub and I'm now blogging from the kitchen table instead of my desk chair.  Sec...

Now I'm blogging from the front porch.

Now, here's the beauty of it all -- I can read content in the aggregator -- without being at my desk.  Now that's how to read more blogs.  Wicked cool.

Worked like a champ.  Literally plug and play.  Install a driver and away I went.  It took longer to restart Windows than it did to get connectivitity.  I just love LinkSys.  I've never had a bad LinkSys experience.  How many companies can you say that about?  And, no, I don't own stock (not even sure if they are public or not)." [The FuzzyBlog!]

Aggregators are only one piece of the puzzle. Wireless is another big one. Put the two together and  imagine being able to read your aggregator anywhere, any time on your smartphone/PDA/portable-computing-device. Adam Curry's doing it now, and it's in the future for the rest of us, too.

Mailman RSS Feeds

"Morbus Iff just told me about Justin Mason's Mailman-to-RSS script.. He takes Mailman hosted email lists, and makes them fully metadata'd RSS 1.0 feeds. Like this one for FoRK. Marvellous." [Content Syndication with XML and RSS]

Filing this one away for future reference because we might be migrating our mailing lists to Mailman this summer.