I was checking our search logs on KickRSS.com and thought I’d share some of the top things I found people are searching for (all related to RSS).

I copied 26 of the most popular RSS related phrases that I found in our AWStats log file and I’ll go down the list from most popular phrases to the least popular.

RSS videos: that was at the top of the list. For me, when I think video, I think YouTube, Google Video, Dave TV, and a few others. Being someone that is frequently seeking RSS feeds myself, I tend to prefer video sites that offer their video content via RSS.

While the links are not prominent, Google video offers up RSS feeds for nearly all videos posted to the web site. They may offer RSS on every video but I’m not quite sure about that. One feature that I discovered which is really cool is that you can take your favorite search term and create an RSS feed of Google videos with it. For example, clicking on the following link (which will open in a new window) for the search term “planetc1” will bring up videos related to that term in an RSS feed. Using a JavaScript generator, a user could categorize groups of videos into an RSS feed, and then display that feed on their web site. One example of this technique can be seen on the web site theater near me. The page format is sloppy, but that’s probably a CSS stylesheet problem not related to the RSS feed itself.

As of today’s post, I only located five user accounts using the term “video” to describe their feeds. Here are the direct links, both in HTML as well as the RSS with stylesheet pages. Video_RSS (RSS) | RSS-Video-Library (RSS) | GgL-Video_RSS (RSS) | Top_20_New_Videos (RSS) | webcam videos (RSS)

list of RSS feeds: that was the second-most popular term appearing in the log files. KickRSS.com is not really a list of RSS feeds. Currently, it is more a list of public user accounts that share their lists of RSS feeds (a list of lists). Some websites are doing a fine job when it comes to organizing RSS feeds. Some of my personal favorites when it comes to sites categorizing their RSS feeds include: CNN (a link to CNN RSS page), Yahoo! (a link to Yahoo’s RSS page), Engadget (I don’t have a link to their RSS feed directory but you can access their RSS feed from the Engadget homepage).

I think Engadget is doing a fantastic job with their RSS feeds. I love seeing images mixed in with their content. Yahoo! is doing some really spectacular things in the area of RSS when it comes to mixing, mashing, and serving up content elsewhere. Here is a great page for RSS developers.

The list of popular search terms continued with video rss, rss music videos, and rss video. If anything, the results of the searches should be a reminder to anyone developing RSS related content that video is where it’s at (or where it is going).

After the video related search terms the list continues on with RSS feed directory, RSS XML feeds, RSS news feed, RSS links, RSS data feeds, blogs and RSS, Google News RSS, RSS news alerts, RSS news feeds, and I’m stopping there as I don’t know what I’d write about regarding each of these terms that would be unique.

By looking at the pattern above, after video, there’s a lot of search for news related topics via RSS. That is probably the most abundant and widespread use of RSS technology. If you are searching for particular RSS feeds themselves (not including those on KickRSS.com) here is a method that I use frequently on Google to locate XML files (the raw RSS feed) for topics I’m interested in. In the search box, type your keyword, and then the string filetype:xml, after it. So for example, if you are seeking sports related XML feeds you would type sports filetype:xml and if you are seeking video feeds you would type video filetype:xml and for news you would type news filetype:xml (got it?).

Among the 26 terms, the word XML appeared only 3 times (XML stands for Extensible Markup Language), while the word feed appeared 10 times. The word RSS appeared in all 26 combinations.

Happy Rssing!