世論 What Japan Thinks

I get the impression that iShare’s monitor panel is relatively web-savvy, but the results from a recent survey into RSS (Really Simple Syndication, or Rich Site Summary) indicates that there is still relatively little use.

Demographics

Over the 4th and 5th of September 2008 309 members of the CLUB BBQ free email service completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 58.3% of the sample were male, 12.9% in their twenties, 43.4% in their thirties, 32.4% in their forties, and 11.3% in their teens or aged fifty or older.

One of the most powerful ways to use RSS is through Google Blog Search and Google News; after typing in the search you want to make, look at the left-hand column and find the “RSS” link. This gives you a link that can be pasted into a suitable RSS reader (I use Google Reader) and every time a new blog post or news story that matches that search appears the results appear in your reader.

Finally, you can get both this blog and the latest comments through RSS.

Research results

Q1: Do you use RSS? (Sample size=309)

	All	Male N=180	Female N=129
Yes (to SQs)	24.9%	27.8%	20.9%
No	48.2%	50.0%	45.7%
Don’t know what RSS is	26.9%	22.2%	33.3%

Q1SQ1: What tools do you use to read RSS? (Sample size=77, multiple answer)

Web browser	59.7%
Web service	42.9%
Email	14.3%
Stand-alone application	16.9%
Other	0.0%

Q1SQ2: About how many RSS feeds do you read? (Sample size=77)

One to four	35.1%
Five to nine	24.7%
Ten to nineteen	15.6%
Twenty to twenty-nine	9.1%
Thirty to forty-nine	3.9%
Fifty or more	11.7%

Q1SQ3: What kinds of RSS feeds do you read? (Sample size=77, multiple answer)

News, media	75.3%
Blog, personal site	67.5%
Hobbies	33.8%
Community (BBS, etc)	24.7%
Business information (press releases, etc)	16.9%
Sports	10.4%
Finance	9.1%
Other	2.6%