According to this NYT article,

Visitors to nytimes.com via R.S.S. feeds has soared from about 500,000 a month at the end of 2003, to 7.3 million last April, said Toby Usnik, the New York Times Company’s director of public relations.

Note it’s the PR director. All companies should make company news available via — clearly there’s a market for it. With the next version of Windows supporting RSS and Atom natively, even the technology laggards will have reading capabilities. This popularity is one of the reasons so many firms are trying to capitalize on RSS and Atom (with ads in feeds, etc.).

It’s a shame companies like Apple and Microsoft say “RSS” when they mean “RSS and Atom” but nobody has really come together on a decent name, so one is better than two (or three, if you count ). And for dawg’s sake, get rid of the ugly orange buttons. I think the Firefox ‘feed available’ button has promise, except for the color. Maybe something like iTunes 4.9 new podcast button (but obviously not a microphone).

My name and color gripes aside (I guess I need my coffee fix), I’m surprised we haven’t seen more web analytics vendors announcing RSS features (analyzing the feeds, or making the results available via RSS), like we did when we saw everyone pile on other trends like Linux and mobile devices.

All the branding buttons — sheesh.