Let's say you're a butcher, a baker or a candlestick maker. You want to get up to speed on the social media activity in your market, as fast as you can. Or perhaps you want to sell things to candlestick makers online, or you're a journalist writing a story about blogging butchers, or maybe you've got some kind of weird baking fetish or academic interest. Is there any way to ramp up your knowledge of these fields, fast, other than the "Google and wander" method? We think there is. Below you'll find step-by-step instructions, with screen shots, for the process we use when we want to get smart about a new field in a hurry. Sponsor Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! Works With Just About Anything We'll use the field of Education as our example, because there is a lot of activity there and we presume we've got more educators as readers here than butchers or candlestick makers. These methods can be applied to discovering the hottest people and topics in social media in any field, though. If you doubt that these kinds of steps could help in your line of work - check out this post , where we found the best work-related RSS feeds for Fire Inspectors and Physical Therapists, just to prove that we could. In the following 13 steps, we'll walk you through how we identify top blogs on any topic, how we quickly figure out what their most popular recent posts have been about, how we incorporate their blog archives into our knowledge about the field and how we find where else they are participating in conversation around the web. Going through the whole process takes us less time than it took us to write this post. No end of variations are possible, of course, on this method - but we expect a lot of readers will find this useful. People new to social media are often frustrated when they are told to "join the conversation" - because they aren't sure where to find the conversation. Here's how we find and track the most popular conversations in niche fields. Popularity isn't a perfect judge of quality by any means, but it's a good place to start from. Is this post a cheat sheet? Maybe, but we think of it as a way for you to make your cheat sheet on whatever sector you follow. Find The Most Popular Blogs in Your Field There are many different ways to identify the top blogs in a given field, systematically, but some methods work better than others depending on the niche you're looking at. We compared six of our favorite methods in this post . Here, we found that visiting http://delicious.com/tag/blog+teaching gave us good results. By default the URLs are listed in reverse chronological order - the most recent items that anyone has bookmarked and have ever been called both "blog" and "teaching" will appear first. In the image above you can see that we're running two Greasemonkey scripts called Autopagerize and Sort By Popularity . Greasemonkey is really easy to use, see our post How to Learn to Use Greasemonkey in 5 Minutes. . These scripts let us open multiple pages of bookmarks all at once and then sort them in order of popularity. So we did that, then scanned down the top several pages of most popular items tagged both "blog" and "teaching." We tried words other words like "education" as well. Each time we found a good site, we copied the link to it and went to step two. Add The Feeds to a Reader We like to use Netvibes to build collections of feeds because it's easy. Click on "add items" then "add feed" and paste in the link to the top blog you found. Netvibes will auto-discover the RSS feed for the site, often multiple variations but it shouldn't matter which one you choose. We pick "RSS 2.0" just because it's the most standard. Add it to your page and then go back to Delicious to find more sources. We repeated the discovery step until we found about 10 good blogs to subscribe to. Then we visited those blogs and looked at their "blogrolls" or sidebar links to their favorite blogs. We found a number of good sources to include in our list that we had never heard of before. One was a good looking blog about education and technology that was written in Spanish, so we grabbed its feed and ran it through Mloovi.com to have it automatically translated into English, then put that translated feed into Netvibes. Once you've got a good collection of top blogs in that Netvibes "tab" it's time to get it out of there. You can read the blogs in Netvibes, but there's more that we're going to do with these blogs. When you're in the "add feed" screen, you'll see an "OPML Export" link. OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) is the format that reading lists are imported and exported from feed readers in. It's really simple. Export it to your dekstop and then move onto the next step below. We're now going to edit an OPML file - but don't be scared! It's easy, we promise. Anyone can do it. Pull Out Your New Tab's Feeds This step assumes you've using Netvibes, or some other start page, for other things in addition to this project. If that's not the case, skip to the next step. We use Netvibes for a number of different things, so when we put together a new collection of feeds in it and want to export them, we have to deal with the fact that our whole collection of feeds in all our tabs gets exported. Simply search for the title of your tab in the file, then delete everything outside of that section! Everything except the very beginning and end of the file, that is. You can see what it should look like below, in the next step. The Top of the OPML File. Don't delete the document type declaration of the body tags. Rename the title of the file and resave your document. Now don't you feel smart? That was really easy though! Now to Find the Hottest Posts from Those Top Blogs Now that you've got an OPML file of the most popular blogs in your field, you can take that file over to Postrank.com and import it. You'll need to create an account, and the service doesn't allow you to manage multiple OPML files, so you may need to create a new account for every time you do something like this. I just create a new account with a GMail alias. Did you know that as while other apps, like Postrank, think that emailmarshall@gmail.com, emailmarshall+1@gmail.com and emailmarshall+2@gmail.com are all different emails - Gmail considers them the same thing? It's true, that's an alias and all emails sent to any of those will end up in the same inbox. So I create a new account for each OPML file (silly, but that's how you've got to do some of these things) and then import my new OPML file. Rank the Blog Posts With Robots! Once you import that OPML file from your desktop, you'll probably notice that Postrank has seen some of the feeds and not seen others. You should probably come back in an hour once they've processed the remaining feeds. What are they doing? They are checking every item in every feed to see how many comments it has, how many inbound links, how man times it's been bookmarked in Delicious or Digg, how many times people Tweeted about it, etc. It's then ranking each item in each feed on a scale of 1 to 10, relative only to the other items in that same feed. What does this mean? It means you can have Postrank show you only the most popular posts in each of these top blogs, as determined by the blogs' own communities of readers. That's valuable information! It's a very fast way to get up to speed on the latest hot topics in your field and by subscribing to the feeds filtered for popular items, you can pay peripheral attention to this field but know that you'll never miss a really big story. Thanks Postrank! If you're interested in the Greatest Hits of Top Education Bloggers, here's the OPML file we built with the feeds we've found so far: Top Education Blogs - Greatest Hits . Just right click and save that link, then upload it to your feed reader. Banish Content Overload By selecting all the feeds in your collection, then setting their filter to "great" - you'll be shown just the hottest posts from each blog. Selecting "best" will show you almost nothing at all, though. Once you've set the filter to Great, export this filtered version of your OPML file and move on to the next step! Pretty Up Your Collection We would recommend opening this new OPML file in your text editor and renaming it something more useful. Check Out the Hotness By clicking on any of the feeds you imported into Postrank, you can check out the hottest posts in that blog's recent history. Hello time saver! Some of you might be temped to call it a day at this point, and we have captured a lot of good intelligence with relatively little work - but don't stop now, there's more we can do! You'll want to take these next steps, too. Import Into a Feed Reader Go back to your Netvibes or other reader's "add a feed" page and you'll see the option to import an OPML file. Import your new Postrank.com filtered OPML file and you'll be subscribed to just the hottest posts from the best blogs in your field of interest. Oh but there's still more we can do! Make a List of the Links You Found There's a number of different ways you can do this, you could have made a separate list of your links before you subscribed to their feeds, but I didn't in this example. Instead I went into Netvibes, clicked on the title of each blog and copied its home page URL over to a list in a text editor. Why do you want this list of links? Check out the next step. Make a Reference Search Engine! Google Custom Search Engine is really easy to use and is an incredibly powerful tool. Just paste the list of all your top sources in your field into the box on the page, save it, then bookmark the URL of the resulting search engine. Now any time you want to look real smart on a topic in education, you can just search for keywords in your Top Education Blogs Custom Search Engine. We have a lot of different Custom Search Engines that we use here at ReadWriteWeb. Want to see what the results look like? Here's the Custom Search Engine we've got so far for Top Education Blogs .

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How to: Build a Social Media Cheat Sheet for Any Topic

It's one thing to have resolutions for the new year. I, for example, plan to lose weight, learn Python and design the perfect handbag. But since nothing satisfies like the quick achievement of a short-term goal, here are eight things every good nerd needs to to before the ball drops later this week. These tasks comprise a quick to-do list that will leave you feeling competent and prepared for the decade that approaches. Also, you can play the condescension chip and start chiding friends who haven't checked off these items yet. Sponsor 1. Edit your privacy settings and friendships. Facebook's maelstrom-causing privacy changes have given quite a few of us a head-scratching good time trying to figure out just how much of our private lives are to be made public. Before the new year begins, take a look at your settings on sites such as Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, LiveJournal and any other places you might be sharing personal content to make sure what you display is consistent with the public image you want to project. As more recruiters and employers hit the web in search of info on individuals, it's becoming ever more important to monitor and control our own identities. If you look back to the origin dates of some of your accounts, you might be surprised at what you thought was appropriate to share online in 2005. Also, while considering what's private and public, take time to evaluate what a "friend," "contact" or "follower" means to you and what types of information you share with different groups. 2. Change your passwords. Safety first, friends. Social web security threats in 2009 were sweeping and surprised more than a few users with spam DMs, hacked accounts and malware of all kinds. Check out the password management tools recommended by a recently high-profile hacker (scroll to the last few paragraphs); for free or cheap, they'll help you generate strong, random passwords and manage them from your computer. 3. Own your name. I've conducted many a web search on many a professional geek this year, and I've been disappointed by how few of us have staked a meaningful claim to our online identities. If you haven't already, buy a URL - preferably one that relates to the name you use professionally - and make friends with Google. If you don't show up in the first results when you search for your name, get a crash course in SEO and ask friends to link to you. It's good for your social life and your career if you seize the opportunity to tell the searching world about yourself rather than relegating that responsibility to LinkedIn, Facebook or some weirdo with the same name as you. 4. Prune your feeds. When going through your RSS feeds, do you find yourself impatiently scrolling more than you're intently skimming? Is your list of unread items becoming unmanagable? The end of the year is a perfect time to get rid of the content you're not reading and group the stuff you are. Take some time this week to organize, delete and add feeds, thereby optimizing your feed-reading experience. Try tools such as NetNewsWire's "dinosaurs" and "least attenion" features that weed out unread or dormant feeds, and consider implementing tools such as Lazyfeed or Guzzle.it that can bring relevant results from fresh sources. And make sure the feeds you own are easy for others to find, too. 5. Find a better mobile. If you don't have a smartphone already, chances are you'll desperately need one next year. And if you already have one, think long and hard about whether you're happy with your service, network and interface. While you might not be able to run out and buy your dream device before 2010 rolls around, visit a few retailers, read some reviews and have your eye on a good mobile to purchase next year. Mobile tech keeps on booming, and you'll want to ensure a frustration-free year as new apps and OSes roll out. 6. Update copyright notices on your website. Here's a simple, obvious and necessary reminder. Does your website currently claim a copyright year of 2007? While it doesn't put you on the foul side of the law, it does look a bit silly as we head into a new decade. The Next Web has a good bit of dynamic code for site owners. 7. Revisit your blog. That poor, neglected old beast might be long overdue for a design facelift, a blogroll refresh or even just a few new posts. While you're at it, why not set automatic reminders to periodically bug you about posting in the new year? On a more mission-critical note, you'll also want to make sure you're using the most updated version of your CMS; not doing so can can lead to problems from broken plugins to getting hacked . And while you're at it, the year's end might also be a good time to consider switching up your CMS service altogether. 8. Back up your data. Hacks and hardware failures happen. Before 2010, make sure as much of your data as possible is protected. From calendars and contacts to blog posts and work projects, more and more of us are relying on networks of servers and startups to keep us running. So, now might be a good time to download and back up files of LinkedIn contacts and WordPress posts - anything that's valuable to you and portable. Think of it this way: You - or at least parts of you - live in the Internet. If the Internet caught on fire, what would you grab to carry with you out of the blaze? We hope this list helps you all get a few housekeeping items squared away in time for a great New Year's Eve filled with peace of mind and a smug sense of superiority over your fellow nerds. If you can think of any must-do year-end tasks, please let us know in the comments! Discuss

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8 Things Every Geek Needs to Do Before 2010

Ten years ago, Napster revolutionized commercial music by - we're all grownups, let's call a spade a spade - democratizing piracy. Without doubt, consumers in 1999 needed better access to music. They needed the opportunity to preview full tracks, to pick and choose songs from an album and to have instant gratification through online downloads. And 10 years later, consumers still have all those lovely perks. Napster ate it (thanks, Metallica !), but Kazaa sprang from its ashes. Then there was Limewire and its cadre. Due props to Apple for monetizing the system as it stood when the iTunes store came on the scene, but users are now ridiculously entitled about what kinds of readily available (a.k.a. easily stolen) files they are willing to pay for and their justifications for stealing media. Yet musicians, as much as they've tried to adapt, are still getting screwed by the Internet and their fans. Sponsor Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! Napster CEO Says Consumers Needed Free Music, Control On the Napster blog CEO, Chris Gorog, wrote yesterday , "The original Napster hadn't thought through how to protect artists' rights... Napster was about putting the control into consumers' hands so they could find virtually any song they could think of." That kind of thinking makes me twitch. I love users. I am a user. And yes, I've illegally downloaded my fair share of tunes over the years. (Sorry, Journey, but the road trip karaoke sessions would've been meaningless without "Don't Stop Believing".) However, consumers neither need nor deserve control over content they did not create. Illegal downloads have been said by many to stimulate sales; the Radiohead album Kid A is often cited as a case in point. But when users are downloading media as a substitute for actually purchasing it, the paradigm hurts musicians far more than it helps. I would venture to speculate that in P2P ecosystems, users get the glory and commercial musicians get the hard knocks. Users have dozens of ways - P2P, YouTube, a bajillion file-sharing sites - to share music that profit the musicians themselves little or not at all. But where are the online tool kits for the thousands of working musicians - often independent of record labels' heavy duty promotional machines - who live and die by their ability to promote and sell their songs? Napster introduced a single-edged paradigm: free content for users at musicians' and labels' expense. What has the Internet done for musicians and labels lately? Napster Worked Actively Against Musicians, and No One Worked (Well) With Them Napster spent the first part of this decade showing complete disregard for the promotional and sales needs and wants of musicians. Can you imagine what the musical online landscape would look like if they had seen the copyright wars as an opportunity rather than a legal problem? What would have happened if they had invested that time and money in creating a workable solution for getting users to pay for content? If they'd worked with bands to create and market non-audio, extracurricular content for fans? If they'd been creative instead of passive-aggressively litigious ? Here's what happened to musicians working online since 1999: MySpace. MySpace, a tragic tale of clunky interfaces, slow fan-finding, spammy marketing tools, confusing events organization, bad media players and no revenue. While consumers were rejoicing in the newfound glut of free tracks, working musicians (as distinguished from lolling-about-in-the-Playboy-Mansion-grotto musicians), especially the independent ones, had to struggle with the most time-consuming, noisy promotional channel possible. And when a challenger sprung up (Facebook, duh) to take that channel's place, the musicians were homeless because the challenger included no music-related tools. What's the Future Look Like from the Napster P.O.V.? Currently, our musician friends are struggling to craft cohesive online marketing and sales strategies from a patchwork of odds and ends. And Napster? Gorog examines the current landscape of a la carte online music stores (such as iTunes) and streaming media sites (such as Pandora), concluding, "No service has cracked the nut and figured out how to create a profitable business model." What's his company's solution? "With Napster's new offering introduced on May 18, we believe we bring the best of both worlds together. Five bucks each month gets you 5 MP3s" plus streaming audio. Let us introduce a long, thoughtful pause in honor of Napster's $5-for-5 subscription plan, which is as unoriginal as it is a bad deal. It's a mashup of two models that Gorgog just stated didn't work, and when compared to Emusic 's and other sites' subscription plans (about $12 a month gets you about 30 MP3s) and Last.fm/Imeem/Pandora's free streaming offerings, it seems very financially stupid - especially considering that Napster introduced the now commonly held expectation that all this media should be free. Gorog states he sees a future of subscription plans for unlimited, on-demand music. But again, this is a probably not a paradigm that will profit bands . It used to be that record labels were in charge of screwing musicians over (click the link for a classic article by producer Steve Albini). Now, that task has passed to the fans themselves, with special thanks to the developers who focus on illegal file-sharing over usable platforms for musicians and consumers alike. In the coming days, we'd like to address the concerns of and online tools for working/commercial musicians. We're aware of a few good ones, but we encourage you brilliant RWW commenter-types to leave your thoughts - and pointers to musician-friendly startups - below. We've got a cabal of techie-musician-hybrid dudes just waiting to beta test them. Discuss

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10 Years After Napster, Musicians Are Still Getting Screwed

Did you just get cut off? Is a professional driver behaving badly? Was your car towed? Or better, did you see a cute driver (or a really cool car) in the next lane? CarPong is a fun an innovative idea that allows users to send messages to other drivers by using their car's license plate number. Like blog commenting for vehicles, this service lets drivers write messages to other drivers, read what others have said about them and search for notes about other drivers. It's an interesting way to make our cars - and the people in them - a lot more connected in real life, and it just might work. Sponsor Car-to-car communiques remain one of the last frontiers for messaging services and one of the few environments where people are still inside isolationist social bubbles. On the Internet, we've mostly shed the goofy pseudonyms and nondescript avatars of the You've Got Mail era in exchange for real connections between real people. CarPong is exciting because it turns the highways and byways into a sort of chat room. One user called out a license plate of a European spec Ford Fiesta - which might be one of Ford's special social media fleet. Another sends a helpful hint to a fellow driver to invest in some new tires quickly. By and large, the site is so far a litany of complaints about others' bad driving habits. Still, by removing the anonymity of the road, this kind of messaging might encourage more human, more mindful and even kinder driver behavior. Founder Tony Mastrorio wrote us to say, "I am working on getting towing companies to notify car owners when their car has been towed, where they can pick it up and the associated fee. This aspect alone would make the service very useful for many people." He'd also like the site to work a bit like the "How's My Driving" signs we see on commercial vehicles. An enterprise-level CRM platform might also provide a good revenue stream. Currently, the site lacks the national or regional userbase of millions it would need to be truly useful. But I can see this idea spreading like wildfire if drivers like the idea of having a virtual complaints/comments box for those with whom they share the road. On the other hand, there's something about the encoded and regulated nature of license plates that lead one to a certain expectation of privacy. As with linking our real names, identities, careers, birth dates and even home addresses to our online personas, there may be some initial resistance to adding our license plates to that mix. Currently on the site, plates and profiles are not linked, but users can see all comments associated with other users and any reported license plate. How do you feel: Would this kind of transparency about who we are on the road lead to better and more personal communication between drivers? Or are our vehicles and driving records best left to principalities more private than the Internet? Let us know what you think in the comments. Discuss

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SMS on Wheels: CarPong Is Vehicle-to-Vehicle Messaging

In 2009, the average U.S. Internet user spent 13 hours per week online. This number is down slightly from last year. Thanks to the large interest in the presidential election and financial crisis, the average Internet user was online for roughly 14 hours per week in 2008. According to a new poll from Harris Interactive , users between 30 to 39 are the most active Internet users. On average, this group is online for 18 hours per week. Sponsor Overall, the average time online for U.S. Internet users has gone up from 7 hours in 1999 to close to 9 hours in 2003 and up to 11 hours in 2007. We should note that these numbers only include adults. According to Nielsen , which looked at all U.S. Internet users, the average usage per week is closer to 17 hours. 98% of All Computer Users in the U.S. are Online The number of adults who are online has not changed since 2007. In total, 184 million adults regularly surf the Internet at work, home or at school. While the number of adults who are online has not changed, the number of adults who access the Internet at home has increased from 66% in 2005 to 76% in 2009. Ten years ago, only 56% of all adults accessed the Internet from home. In total, 98% of all computer users are now online. While users between 30 and 39 are the most active Internet users, those between 25 and 29 are the most likely to spend more than 24 hours per week online. 25% of 25 to 29-year-olds surf the Net between 24 and 162 hours per week - sadly, Harris Interactive doesn't tell us how many of these users actually spend every minute of the week online. Online Shopping With regards to online shopping, Harris found that 50% of adults bought something online in the last month. Not surprisingly, 30 to 39-year-olds are the most active online shoppers. How High Will These Numbers Go? Given how popular online video and social networks have become over the last few years, chances are that the average number of hours spend online will continue to grow up slowly over the next few years. U.S. Internet users who watch TV online watch close to 18 hours of online video per week already. In the U.K., the average Facebook user spends close to three full days per year on the site. Without doubt, however, there will be a natural limit to how much time per week people will spend online. Discuss

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U.S. Internet Users Spend 13 Hours a Week Online

With the rapid growth of services like Foursquare , Gowalla and Brightkite , location-based mobile social networks seem to be a dime a dozen these days, but they're only fun and useful if your friends are using it, too. Each time that I've tried one of these services, I find myself trying to convince my friends to use it so that I can have meaningful contacts to keep track of. Some of them don't have the right phone, or are worried about blasting out their GPS coordinates to the world. Sponsor Stalqer , available as a free iPhone app since earlier this month, has solved this problem by connecting to your Facebook , Twitter and Foursquare accounts and providing a map of your friends based on information it gathers from those services, even if they don't use Stalqer. If your friend uses a geo-tagged Tweet, or if they check in on Foursquare, Stalqer knows where they are. Stalqer can even pull your friends' location from their Facebook profiles if they publicly display that information, but in most cases this is limited to the city level. You can also view your friends' locations in a list, or even in an augmented reality view by turning the phone on its side while in the map view, but Stalqer's killer feature is its workaround of a pesky iPhone limitation.

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Stalqer: Aggregated, (Almost) Live Location Data on the iPhone

One of the interesting trends of 2009 has been the gradual decline of RSS Readers as a way for people to keep up with news and niche topics. Many of us still use them, but less than we used to. I for one still maintain a Google Reader account, however I don't check it on a daily basis. I check Twitter for news and information multiple times a day, I monitor Twitter lists, and I read a number of blogs across a set of topics of most interest to me. Frankly I'm more likely to use Google Reader to search for specific information nowadays, than to scan my subscribed feeds for their latest posts [I should note however that our news writers use a variety of RSS Readers daily]. So what's happened to RSS Readers. Do people still use them and is there still a viable market for them? Sponsor In February 2007 we reported on the state of the RSS Reader market, based on statistics from Feedburner and Pheedo. At that point Google had 59% market share amongst web-based RSS Readers, followed by Bloglines with 33%, then Newsgator and Netvibes with 3% (note: this didn't count Newsgator's desktop apps, like FeedDemon). Pheedo's stats in February 2007 were somewhat different: Newsgator Online had 27% share, followed by MyYahoo! with 20%, Blogines 19% and Google Reader 13%. The first time ReadWriteWeb looked into market share for RSS Readers was 5 years ago, in December 2004 . At that point, very early in the web 2.0 era, Bloglines was the clear leader and Google Reader wasn't even a glint in the milkman's eye. 2009 Update on RSS Reader Market Well, unfortunately Feedburner no longer publishes any useful data about RSS Readers. The product has been infrequently updated since Google acquired it in June 2007 and it no longer even has a proper blog (a Google blog called Adsense For Feeds was the closest I could find). Pheedo also has gone quiet from a blogging perspective - its last blog post was January 2009. Tellingly though, it has an active Twitter account . The best data we have then is ReadWriteWeb's own Feedburner account. Here is the top 10 for Dec 09: 1. Google Feedfetcher 85665 (includes both Google Reader and its start page iGoogle) 2. Bloglines 38797 3. Netvibes 34894 4. FriendFeed 16269 5. NewsGator Online 6753 6. Firefox Live Bookmarks 2999 7. PostRank 2454 8. Windows RSS Platform 1587 9. Mac OS X RSS Reader 1307 10. Zhuaxia 1127 (a Chinese RSS Reader) Feedburner's numbers always need to be taken with a large grain of salt, nevertheless we can see that Google is now over twice the number of Bloglines. There's little sign of life on Bloglines' blog either and its Compete.com traffic numbers show a decline since June 2009 . Netvibes, FriendFeed, Newsgator and PostRank are the only other english language competitors showing in our Feedburner numbers. The others are either browser (Firefox) or operating system readers. Also note that Newsgator shut down its online RSS Reader at the end of July this year. Conclusion: Google Dominates, RSS Readers Less Relevant These statistics are by no means the definitive RSS Reader market numbers. They do clearly show two things though: 1) Google now dominates what's left of the RSS Reader market. Bloglines is hanging in there, but it seems like it's given up the fight judging by lack of activity in its blog and traffic dips. 2) RSS reading is a very fragmented experience circa 2009. People can monitor news and information via Twitter, Facebook, start pages like Netvibes, their Firefox bookmarks, their OS, aggregators like Techmeme, and so on. Tell us in the comments how you currently read your RSS feeds and how often you check them in an RSS Reader - if indeed you still use one... Discuss

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RSS Reader Market in Disarray, Continues to Decline