Japanese RSS reader marker small and fragmented
goo Research, along with japan.internet.com carried out their fifth survey on the usage of internet tools. 1,044 people from all over the country, 42.43% male, filled out an internet-based questionnaire in mid-November regarding their usage of internet tools. The age demographics of the survey was 2.30% in their teens, 23.95% in their twenties, 40.61% in their thirties, 22.32% in their forties, 7.85% in their fifties, and finally 2.97% sixty or older.
My personal usage of internet tools is relatively low, I think, even though I run this blog. Feedburner and BlogLines fulfil most of my RSS-related requirements, and Google deskbar is useful too, but since I am a big Opera fan, add-in browser toolbars are not available, but not really needed either. I’m not sure about the exact definition of Alert Services that is used; does setting Windows Update (or any of the numerous other apps that have their own updater) to automatic checking count as using such a service?
Note also that the most popular reason for using a particular RSS service is that a site recommends it. From a blogger’s point of view, does this suggest that we really should jump onto the bandwagons and push our feed links more strongly at our readers? However, after noticing this post on Performancing (the whole site is a recommended read) I wonder if as bloggers we should concentrate as much on a mail feed as on RSS, especially given that over 50% more of the people surveyed here used mail alert services compared to RSS readers.
As a cross-reference, I found a post by Joi Ito regarding this topic with figures from mid June or earlier. RSS readership has grown 50% in just six months, and those not knowing what a blog is has fallen to a quarter of what is was before, according to a recent survey.
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