Since a large portion of this blog’s readers already know what RSS is, I can’t really write a post like that, can I? I had to think of something else to do.

Bloggers are possibly the biggest users of RSS. Superbloggers, or A-List bloggers if you prefer to call them that, often have insanely large amounts of feeds in their aggregators, and check them throughout the day. They become addicted to their feeds, and absolutely have to check them at least once a day. But RSS makes it possible to keep track of so many sites. You have more favorite sites, since you have more time to check on them. If you’re not addicted to RSS feeds yet, you’re doing something wrong.

Here are some links for those of you who are addicted to RSS and want your readers to be as well.

RSS Articles

• Merging RSS Feeds With SimplePie
• 11 Ways to Find New RSS Subscribers for Your Blog
• Free Your Subscriber Stats
• 10 Sure-Fire Ways to Get RSS Readers Visiting Your Blog
• 5 Ways To Make Me Your Subscriber
• Seven Tips for Making the Most of Your RSS Reader
• Get More RSS Feed Subscribers!
• RSS: Best Design Practices And Icons
• 30 tips to Maximize your RSS Feed Subscribers
• 34 Reasons Why Readers Unsubscribe from Your Blog
• The Ultimate RSS Toolbox – 120+ RSS Resources
• Will RSS Ever Go Mainstream?
• Full Or Partial RSS Feeds – The Great Feed Debate
• Reasons to Have a Vanity Folder in Your News Aggregator

RSS Resources

• Feed Icons
• A Few RSS Icon Resources
• The Best Way to Educate Readers About RSS
• SimplePie RSS Parser
• FeedBurner
• TwitterFeed
• 60 Great RSS Icons for Your Blog

RSS Readers – It’s always good to try something new

• Google Reader
• Bloglines
• MyNT – The much improved version 2.0 is currently in the works.
• NewsFire
• FeedDemon
• NetNewsWire
• FeedReader
• GreatNews
• RSS Owl

Feedburner recently reported that they track around 60 million RSS subscribers. Even if we bump that number to 70 million RSS users (counting people that use RSS with other applications or platforms) this would still convert to a meager 5,4% of the Internet users around the world, as of today. (Daily Blog Tips)

That’s not good, is it? 95% of web users still visit sites manually every day, checking the same sites every day for updates. With RSS, you can, at a glance, see if a site has been updated, without visiting it by hand. The web comes to you, instead of you going to the web. It’s time to spread RSS.

RSS Awareness Day is Daniel Scocco’s latest crackpot brilliant idea to increase his subscriber count, er, improve the internet.

Really, you don’t even have to link to Daily Blog Tips to participate. Daniel is working on a site for the event over at rssday.org.

The goal is to get as many people using RSS as possible, so the event works like this:

1. There is a mini-contest-thing to help promote the event. There will be some random drawings from the pool of bloggers who help get the word out about RSS Awareness Day. Blog about it, use one of the buttons/banners that are currently in the works, etc.
2. On May 1st, participants blog about RSS. “You can just mention that it is the RSS Awareness Day and link to some RSS resources, or you can explain what RSS is and teach your readers how they can make the most out of RSS.”

I have some plans evolving for May 1st, though they’re a little vague at the moment. Since a lot of you already know what RSS is, I can’t just write a post explaining what RSS is. I’m planning on planning something a bit more interesting.

What can you do on May 1st?

• Educate your readers. I recommend the excellent video RSS in Plain English. Write a little about how RSS can benefit them, and add the YouTube video to the post. Then tell them to subscribe to your feed.
• Just say “today is RSS awareness day.” (Sure, be boring…)
• Post a big RSS icon, and say “subscribe to my feed if you haven’t already.” Be sure to put a link to a place that says what RSS is.
• Link to some RSS resources.
• Edit your stylesheet and make your blog orange. Be sure to write a post saying why your blog is orange, though. (Orange can look good if it’s done right.)

Have fun, do whatever you want for May 1st, so long has it has some sort of RSS theme to it.