Twelve days ago, Danwei asked readers who use our RSS feeds for some information about their usage habits. These are the results:
71 people sent in responses to the following questions:
1. What software do you use to read RSS feeds? (Please state if you use Mac or Linux, otherwise it will be assumed you use Windows.)
Ranked in order of popularity (some users use more than one, in such cases we only counted the first one they mentioned):
Bloglines 19
NetNewsWire: 16
Thunderbird 13
Firefox (Sage): 12
Yahoo: 5
Newsfire: 2
Feedemon: 2
Acrobat 7: 1
Unidentified: 1
20 of the 71 respondents use a Mac, 3 use Linux and the remaining 48 use Windows (some use both in which case they were counted in the Mac camp).
2. About how many feeds do you subscribe to?
The average was 183. One respondent said he subscribed to 5458 feeds with a few other answers in the high hundreds. Some respondents only mentioned which Danwei feeds they read, so this figure is not accurate. A typical response, perhaps more representative than the average, was 30 to 50 feeds.
3. Do you like to read whole posts in your RSS reader, or do you just use it as a way to find new stuff to look at, that you visit using a web browser?
Readers overwhelmingly prefer to read whole posts, with many people pointing out that excerpts are highly annoying. Only 10 people of 71 said they usually just use the feed to find interesting links.
On that note, the Danwei RSS 2.0 feed seems to have something wrong with it. Our intention is to make everything on the website available as a full RSS feed, so please let us know when the feeds do not work properly. Thanks to all who wrote back.