Almost 3 month ago, on a trip out to Korea, Joi Ito wondered why the blogosphere in Korea is so different from the ones out in the US. In the post, he noted how “closed” their blogosphere was compared to the US. He mentioned that RSS and Trackback were non-existent. And that blogs only link to each other (and back) using the tools and functionalities that the blog aggregators provided, essentially creating a “walled garden” around its own community. Furthermore, the idea that people only blogged for the immediate circle of friends rather than a general “readership” was odd to Joi too.

Of course, the ensuing conversation in the comments section attributed the cause to cultural tendencies, industry concentration, ease of use etc. (more here and here) Or even worse, that the Koreans “simply don’t get it” . . . ie that in the web 2.0 world they should be using an open architecture because …. because its “better” and its “the right thing to do.”

Well in the last few weeks with all the buzz around blogging, RSS and their respective popularity, diffusion, adoption, awareness etc etc. . . I think we can say that we have a definite sampling issue on our hands. In effect, those in the “technorati” circle (me included) have yet to venture out to and truly experience the “other side of the blogosphere” as experienced by the general public.

NetRatings released a report that finally had people questioning the pervasiveness of RSS (and openness) of blog. Whether it is awareness, availability, or usage, the blogosphere is not as “open” as Joi had initially thought in the US. Brad Burnham talks about this sampling problem from the perspective of VC’s in his RSS Geeks Only Please post with a few more follow-ups here, here and here.

Without any number its hard to draw much conclusion as most are simply anecdotal or expressed (surveyed) evidence. . . .so I set out to surf the web to get some #’s. Here is what I came up with . . . and its quite shocking to me in fact.

The RSS-less blog world mainly includes Xanga, LiveJournal, and MySpace. (Myspace is more blogs than social networking, just go check it out)

The RSS-enabled world consists of TypePad, Blogger, Blogspot. (actually more like a % the total since not all RSS feeds are enabled, but for this lets be conservative and assume all these blog are RSS enabled.)

Now the shocking part. . . I found pageview data for July for these sites. . .

Xanga+LiveJournal = 1.6M Pageviews
Xanga+LiveJournal+Myspace = 8.9M Pageviews

Typepad+Blogger+Blogspot = 265K Pageviews

Including Myspace, the RSS-less camp has over 33X the pageviews of the RSS-enabled camp. And around 6X without Myspace.

Now even if there are an equal number of RSS blogs are not hosted by typepad, blogger, and blogspot, the RSS-less world still overwhelms RSS-enabled.

I guess our blogosphere is not so different from that of Korea after all. Look around Xanga or LiveJournal. . . people are simply blogging about their lives to friends and family . . . no annoying meme’s or debates . . . no one trying to get anyone fired . . .

So what does this say about RSS? Well, its hard to use and not as popular as people thought. Lots of work needs to be done to help it “cross-the-chasm.” I have no doubt that it will one day be a fundamental technology of web 2.0; but for now, some one need to work on RSS user friendliness for the Joe Q Public. Oh and we need to get some data (with big enough sample) before drawing random conclusions.