RSS is del.icio.us

Readers with an eye for detail will have noticed the “del.icio.us links” widget in the right column of this blog, just below the “reading list.” (I should say, of course, readers who’ve actually been to the blog, rather than just consuming this in RSS!)

That’s generated by a WordPress Widget, which consumes an RSS feed from del.icio.us.

Whenever I add post a link to del.icio.us, it shows up in that list.

Well, according to the del.icio.us blog:

Well over half of the requests seen by del.icio.us are for RSS feeds[.] That means that people cruising around our site in browsers are actually in the minority, when it comes down to raw traffic. Instead, our heaviest hitters include personalized home pages, desktop news aggregators, and even stranger things.

One of the key joys of RSS is that it can be a wonderful cheap API into any site: server-to-human or server-to-server.