From a consumer perspective, RSS can be a life changing discovery. Where an avid web denizen once spent hours parsing favorite content, they can now become enabled to do so in a matter of minutes. The elation of powering through hundreds of articles (from various publishers) without loading a single URL is indescribable. Oddly enough, adoption rates are staggeringly low.

Robert Scoble says that, among the tech savvy Microsoft employees, only fifteen percent use a news aggregator regularly. Consider, then, that adoption among the average must be immeasurably low. Obviously, entities like FeedBurner feel that this is not an indicator of the potential in such technology.

During Search Engine Strategies, Rick Klau, Vice President of Publisher Services at FeedBurner met with our own Mike McDonald to discuss such issues.

“The moment that RSS becomes the default payload for delivering subscribable content, I think it just becomes like air. People don’t talk about getting html anymore, they just have access to the web. The fact that there are some protocols that make that interplay between a server and a browser work… no one thinks about that anymore. With IE7, with Firefox 2, certainly with iTunes… other applications like that make RSS built in… I think people are increasingly going to take it for granted.”

Klau moved on to say that he also believes that “mobile is clearly going to break out.” With parallel advancements in mobile tech, all this content is portable and RSS allows for the simplest delivery of content to these devices.

In typical business concern, monetization is key. With this in mind, Klau added that “at the end of the day, the way our publishers make money (and they way we at Feedburner make money) is in the build-out of this ad network… in a way that is very consistent with people are already consuming this content.”

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