I’ve taken to seeing how many subscribers there are to a given RSS feed in Bloglines to rate the comparative popularity of a site (including my own of course). Don’t know what RSS or Bloglines are? What ARE you doing reading this site? RSS is Really Simple Syndication and is a “feed” or XML file on a site that posts the headlines, summary (or contents) and link back to a list of articles posted on a site. Most popularly, it is a list of the entries made on a blog. Bloglines is a web-based RSS aggregator. That just means it takes all the RSS feeds I specify and puts the dozens of blog posts and news articles onto a single set of pages of my own grouping. The web the way I like it.

It’s interesting to see the popularity of different sites. CNN has nearly 7,000 subscribers. A lot, huh? (And this is just one RSS aggregator of many out there). Slashdot, a techie web site, has nearly 7 times as many! A relatively obscure site (outside of the digerati circle), BoingBoing, has around 30k. Not really all that fascinating, except to see that geek-related and geek-popular sites are more frequently read via RSS than huge media outlets like CNN.

Oh, and my site? 4.