The RSS Weblog has two interesting posts today that I won't go into too much detail about since no one but me can read what I'm posting (if a blogger blogs in the woods and there's no one around to read it, is it still blogging?...).

• An Open Discussion of Feed-Reading Habits
  "Web designer D. Keith Robinson asks his reader how they consume RSS — full text or summary,  do they mind ads in feeds, and the obligatory 'what reader do you use?' "
   
• RSS Would Be Perfect If...
  "Me? I love RSS. I couldn’t keep up with the embarrassingly small percentage of WIN sites I read if I didn’t have FeedDemon, but there are a few things I wish RSS and feed readers could do."

Interesting questions and thoughts proposed in both pieces, which run parallel to something I've been thinking about - the different types of RSS readers (human, not machine). Thinking about it in the car this morning, I came up with four distinct types of RSS users that I know of (in no particular order):

1. The Anal Information Junkie -  reads looks at every post and gets the shakes when she can't goes too long without her aggregator (I'm in this category)
2. The Trend Spotter - scans for patterns and digs deeper when a specific topic starts percolating (I think Bernie Goldbach is in this category)
3. The RSS Pack Rat - keeps an archive of selected feeds that can be searched when the pack rat wants to research a topic (I think Phil Wolff is in this category, but there are similarities to the Trend Spotter)
4. The Casual Causal RSS Reader - someone who has a reader (or an account for one somewhere) and has subscriptions, but only reads them when she has time, which is rare, so it normally takes an out-of-the-ordinary event to get the user back to the reader (I know a couple of people at my office that I think fall into this category because they don't have time to read their Bloglines accounts regularly, until something forces them to)

What RSS profiles have I missed? Which one are you? How does a #4 get to a #1? Is one of the great things about RSS that it works well for all of these types?