It was two years ago that I postured here about why we use FeedBurner. For the most part, the substance of what I observed there is still true, although predictably the numbers cited have changed. According to FeedBurner, the LSNC Advocate Feed averages about 30 feed pulls a day, about double what was occuring two years ago, even though Google Analytics tells me that overall site traffic is down significantly from past historic heights. (Webdogs 2.0 gets almost exactly the same amount of feed pulls, even though posts here are not remotely as regular as they are at the LSNC site.)

The biggest piece of the drop in LSNC main site traffic is attributable to our moving the California Food Stamp Guide, which had resided on the LSNC site for the prior five years, to its own domain. (For what it’s worth, traffic at the Food Stamp Guide is still growing incrementally but seems to be topping out at about 54,000 visitor sessions/570,000 page views a year.) But other pieces affecting LSNC site traffic is the systematic removal of site file flotsam as part of The Findability Project (TFP), and the decision to remove specific advocate content that was valued back in the day but is too out-of-date to be reliable. For example, we recently canned a several-years old CalWORKs/TANF guide (built on MediaWiki, which we have dropped as a publishing platform) because we simply don’t have the resources to keep it current. We’re trying to do our best to be responsible to the advocates who use our site.

For a legal services field program, LSNC generates an enormous amount of public web content. For example, during the month of December 2008 alone, the ten staff who post at LSNC’s seven public feeds posted 68 items. No one’s complaining.

But do legal services advocates use feeds? Not really. Some do, but it is telling that Webdogs — a particularly niche site for documenting various tech projects I and others at LSNC work on — gets as many or more feed pulls as LSNC’s various advocate content sites that get mucho thousands of site visitors every month. Geeks use feeds. Normals do not, for the most part.

This conclusion is reinforced by what we see in our FeedBurner account. About 200 people (OK, to be exact, 199 people) currently subscribe to FeedBurner-generated email subscriptions to receive our Cases and Regs updates via email. Even though we have offered full-text feeds for both since inception, as far as we can tell, less than 10 people use a feed reader regularly to pull that same content.

That’s a perspective on how advocates likely use email subscriptions, as opposed to direct feeds, to get web content. At the same time, I recognize that even my own habits have shifted on this. Over time, I have changed my own behavior because of how I rely on these two different ways of getting new information. Two years ago I was feed reader crazy, tracking something like 250 feeds using FeedDemon. Now, I have a better handle on what I want to follow, and now use the much improved Google Reader to track about 80 feeds — and, hey, 20 of those are Google-related blogs! Even those 80 feeds followed are what I consider information “step children.” Because of the central role Gmail plays in my daily work style, I now use email subscriptions as my preferred method for getting select fresh web content that I want to be sure to see, so I make sure it hits my Inbox. (My current fave for doing this is Feed My Inbox.) I go to Google Reader to follow other feeds when I have time, which is to say not daily. But when I absolutely, positively gotta get it delivered to my eyeballs, I use an email subscription.

That’s my reality. Your mileage may differ.

Of course, this had a lot of play in the tech press last week (prematurely) and this week (for real): For those suffering Gmail envy, this week Google opened up its public Gmail service to everyone on the planet. You no longer need to be “invited” or use your mobile phone to get in. Now you can go directly to Gmail and sign up. Among the advantages of having a private Gmail account is that you can use it to manage all your other email accounts, both incoming and outgoing! To encourage folks to sign up, the crack(ed) Gmail team has mounted Gmail Puppet Theater in four acts to reveal four really good reasons for going with Gmail: spam control, message threading, great searchability, and instant messaging.

I agree with the first part of his observation; I question the second part. What seems more likely is that users will eventually accept feeds as simply the way one “subscribes” to a service providing periodic content, call it a “newsletter” or “blog” or whatever, and one’s email client is a likely place a lot of users will rely on as the point of pull for their favorite feeds. I don’t think readers of content care what it is called; what they will care about if anything is the content itself, not how it is published. The current distinctions made between newsletters and blogs are already little more than technological artifice. And Pegoraro’s “end of email” message makes the point: It lags behind a shift that has largely already taken place at the paper, where most anything you want from topical content or columnists or other opinionistas is available not as an email newsletter service but as part of 150+ RSS feeds.