It's The Feed Stupid

I was sitting with Dick Costolo, the founder and CEO of Feedburner yesterday. He was taking me through my Feedburner stats page. And it hit me like a ton of bricks. I’ve got two to three times as many people who read my feed as those who read my blog. And the ratio is going up every day. I’ve put all this time and energy into my blog page with House Ads, Adsense, Blogrolls, etc and it’s a total waste of time and energy. Because by the end of this year, the number of people who actually visit my blog will be less than 10% of my total audience.

So, this means that the smart money is going to go into the feed space. Because that’s where the action is. Forget AdSense. I need contextual ads built right into my feed. Forget Typepad links, I need the links built right into my feed. Same with comments. And the feed needs to be two way. Atom has that capability I am told. So let me comment right in the feed. That’s a hell of lot better than Trackback.

For all the creativity that blogs have unleashed, its just the tip of the iceberg. RSS is a fundamental “good technology” (ie open and extendable) that is going to impact the Internet in the same way that open standards like HTTP, HTML, and MP3 have.

I am sure that many of your have figured this out already. To which I say – Good, what are you doing with RSS? I want to hear about it.