I was updating my big list’o’links this morning and realised something: of the sites I’ve linked to, I’ve barely visited the ones without RSS feeds. It’s not intentional, it’s just that when you get used to newsreader software you spend less and less time using your Web browser.

I wouldn’t go as far as Microsoft’s Robert Scoble and suggest that every site needs RSS, but if you’re blogging it might be a very good idea to enable your blogging software’s RSS export. After all, the whole point of scribbling online is that you want people to read it – so if you don’t have RSS, you might not be getting as many readers as you might wish.

Incidentally, Lifehacker’s come up with a good solution to the “if I run a full-content RSS feed, nobody sees the ads” dilemma facing commercial sites: its feeds now come in two flavours. If you want the full-content feed you have to endure text ads; if you don’t want the ads, you can subscribe to the partial-content version instead.