Do you RSS? Can you Digg it?

A recent survey of the online experience of Base One employees showed that while we're a pretty web-savvy bunch, there are some popular web tools we currently don't use very much - namely RSS and social bookmarking.

This stood out to me for two reasons. Firstly, according to our survey over 40% of us don't use these tools - a higher number than I expected. Secondly, I think RSS and social bookmarking are some of the most useful online tools available to us right now.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) brings the latest content (feeds) from your favourite sites straight to you. The RSS I use is especially convenient as my feeds are collated alongside my online email so I can check them at the same time. I'll admit I'm not sure if I'd find it as useful if I had to use a separate programme to collect feeds, but even so it would still be quicker than checking out 10 separate sites several times a week.

There are several well-known social bookmarking sites on the web (I personally use del.icio.us, but there are plenty out there) and it's invaluable to have your favourite sites bookmarked centrally. So whether you're at work, at home, or travelling, you can access your most frequently used web pages regardless of which computer or browser you're using.

The really useful content in a site is often buried deep, which usually means the URL you need may be too long to remember days later. This is just one of the things that makes social bookmarking great for online research - you don't need to remember URLs, you just check your bookmarks anywhere, anytime. And since URLs are tagged by other users as well, you can search those tags as an alternative route to finding related, useful content.

So I'm left wondering why RSS and social bookmarking came out so low on our internal survey. Are they not as well-known as I think, or are they considered merely the domain of the geek? Or maybe it's simpler than that, and we're all so dependent on search engines that we see no reason to remember a site when it can be found again with a quick visit to Google? I'm still not sure...