While researching the "long tail" phenomenon of consumption of electronic content, it struck me that the reverse of this phenomenon applies to the adoption of RSS/Atom/web feeds.

In general, the long tail phenomenon refers to a behaviour of the usage, adoption, sales, or general consumption of content (CDs, books, DVDs, e-books, website pageviews, email), especially electronic content. I don't want to get into a lengthy discussion about the long tail, so I'll just summarize.

The gist of this phenomenon is that content is consumed in an exponentially decreasing quantity daily. But the surprising result is that the tail of the consumption graph adds up to greater consumption than before the tail.

To clarify, if a book sells 100,000 copies in its first year, but continues to sell for another 9 years under "naturally" declining sales, the total of sales over years 2-10 is usually greater than for year 1 alone.

Each specific item of content has a different sales/consumption lifespan, but all of them exhibit an exponentially decreasing consumption curve. This applies to pageviews of a webpage, or even content items in an RSS feed.

On the other hand, it appears that the adoption of a new technology exhibits the reverse of a long-tail curve over its lifetime. Instead, the curve is exponentially increasing. So in year, say, 5, of the life of a technology, it is being used by more new consumers than all previous years put together. [We are ignoring the case where a technology stops being used altogether. If this happens, the consumption curve starts to decline exponentially.]

What does all this mean? It means that while adoption of RSS both for publishers and consumers of digital content may increase exponentially, the current usage curve is shallow enough that without more evangelizing, it may take longer to adopt RSS than the Internet in general.

(c) Copyright 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://www.chameleonintegration.com/