wolfb - feeds and RSS

What is what holds the blogosphere together ?  Without any doubt, one of its basic pillars is the RSS and atom feeds. They link sites together, transfer the information rapidly, allow subscriptions and replication.

But, did you ever consider that most of these feeds are hosted in Feedburner ? Feedburner has a fantastic feed hosting service that gives the webmaster flexibility and statistics (among other things) for free. I use then and their service is excellent.

But what would happen if Feedburner goes down or doesnt' work (for any reason)  ?

These are the most important blogs according to Technorati:

1. Engadget http://www.engadget.com - 25,465 blogs link here - uses direct rss http://www.engadget.com/rss.xml
2. 老徐   徐静蕾   新浪BLOG - http://blog.sina.com.cn/m/xujinglei - 22,785 blogs link here - direct rss - http://blog.sina.com.cn/myblog/index_rss.php
3. Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things - http://www.boingboing.net - 20,518 blogs link here - feedburner - http://feeds.feedburner.com/boingboing/iBag
4. Gizmodo, The Gadget Guide - http://www.gizmodo.com - 13,811 blogs link here - direct rss - http://gizmodo.com/index.xml
5. Daily Kos: State of the Nation - http://www.dailykos.com - 12,912 blogs link here - feedburner http://feeds.dailykos.com/dailykos/index.xml
6. Techcrunch - http://www.techcrunch.com - 12,022 blogs link here - feedburner - http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch
7. PostSecret - http://postsecret.blogspot.com - 11,740 blogs link here - feedburner - http://feeds.feedburner.com/Postsecret
8. The Huffington Post - http://www.huffingtonpost.com - 11,228 blogs link here - direct rss - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/raw_feed_index.rdf
9. Lifehacker, the Productivity and Software Guide - http://www.lifehacker.com - 10,255 blogs link here - direct rss
10. Crooks and Liars - http://www.crooksandliars.com - 9,598 blogs link here - feedburner - http://feeds.feedburner.com/crooksandliars/YaCM

In total, out of a total of 150,344 blogs connected to these "top blogs", 44% are fed by Feedburner. Interesting. And this is even more important in smaller blogs. Most people use Feedburner because they are the best. But it poses some risks.

Labels: rss, web