"Well, time to do an exercise I haven't done in a long time: web server logs inventory... 10 most downloaded RSS feeds from NewsIsFree:

• CNN
• Scientific American
• USA Today
• New Scientist
• Blue's News
• BBC World
• Science Daily
• FARK
• NYT International News
• IDG Infoworld

Number 1 was downloaded nearly four hundred thousand times. Number 10, one hundred and fifty thousand times. Sometime this month though, that feed stop sending real content and is redirecting people to IDG's own feed they started providing....

IE 6 is twice as popular as IE 5.5. Radio Userland is used as much as IE 5.5....

A bad number (not that the others were good): our front page only gets a quarter of the hits that the most popular RSS feed gets. And it's the only non RSS page which appears in the top 30! This means their is no way the portal can in itself sustain the RSS feeds, whether by advertising or by subscription. And no matter what service we can come up with, people can get the feeds and replicate pretty much of it on their desktop. Which, in the light of recent developments in news aggregators and web services, is probably a good thing! So it looks like pretty much inevitable that the RSS feeds will have to go, and some other form on content delivery will have to be designed. I wonder what the less disruptive way of doing it would be..." [Too Much News]

Some interesting statistics from Mike Krus that highlight how popular aggregators are, although admittedly they're not even close to a tipping point yet. Obviously, the big numbers are the good news. The number of Radio users versus IE 5.5 is also interesting, showing the impact it's had at the intersection of blogging and news aggregation.

The bad news is, Mike has to figure out a way to make some money from NewsIsFree, which as he admits, is going to be difficult. I'm not sure what the revenue model is here yet, although I wish there was a way for Mike's karma in the community to translate to some profits.

I hope this isn't a case of Mike being ahead of his time. It's too bad the BigPubs aren't looking to him to help syndicate their content, since they have the most to gain from wider distribution right now. Today I realized that I have read more articles from the Chicago Sun-Times in the last two months than I had in the last ten years, all because Mike's providing their feed to my aggregator. So thanks, Mike, from me and the Sun Times (even though they don't know it yet).

Here are the results so far of the poll of bloggers and how many sites they track daily. Currently, more folks read between 21-50 sites (32% of you), with the next level being 21% reading 11-20 sites. Here's a graphic of the full current results set, although you can view it live, too. Interestingly, 11% read 81 sites or more in their aggregators, one of whom is reading more than 231 (hiya, Phil!).

I wasn't thinking clearly when I designed the form, though, because it doesn't really answer the question I wanted to ask. I want to know how many sites are being read by those using news aggregators versus those visiting sites manually. Plus, I don't think I really care if you're a blogger or not, so to rectify this situation, I have started yet another poll that is open to everyone.

• If you are using a news aggregator, please fill out this survey and let me know how many sites you read daily.
   
• If you are NOT using a news aggregator, please fill out this other survey and let me know how many sites you ready daily.

These are the numbers I want to track over the next six months to see if they go up as more people learn about aggregators. Thanks for helping satisfy my curiousity!