Rss Impact On Web Traffic, Staff Monitoring, Etc.

Boberang · Joined: Oct 13, 2003 Posts: 6

I think rss is meant (partially) to cut down on web traffic and increase productivity by having the channels brought to you, but if you are an IT manager of a company of 200 employees, and 80% of those employees start using rss for legitimate (work related news, blogs, etc.) and not so legitimate (general news, comics, etc.), what are your concerns going to be?

What is the overal ip traffic flying around as people have their feeds updated hourly? 160 users x 50 channels each = a lot of traffic

An employee who has a couple hundred news feeds is going to appear to have much more traffic, and thus possibly a sign of abusing his/her internet access for work purposes, than somebody who doesn't even use rss. Their PC's cache and history folder is probably going to be quite telling as well.

Productivity increase for bringing in work related rss fees, but what about all those other questionalbe feeds and their impact on the bottom line?

Just asking for thoughts. :-)

Bob

teaman2000 · Joined: Aug 27, 2003 Posts: 9

Yes, but it's 160 users x 50 channels x 1K files = 8M per hour, at a max. Which isn't a huge amount of bandwidth -- probably less than one good session at a porn site B).

Plus, there are a lot of ways to reduce this -- for a start, get your users on a client that checks to see if an RSS file has updated before it downloads a new copy. Most RSS feeds update a lot less frequently than hourly. You can also do caching on your server. You could also set up a program like Amphetadesk to provide a centralized RSS page that your users would only get to check but not to configure themselves.