Just come across this thread. I have a news page on a small site and put key headlines on an rss feed. As far as I can make out from the site stats I have one visitor who has used Firefox smart bookmarks and two who have subscribed to the feed with news aggregators compared with a mailing list of around 200.
Basically people seem happy with email and want information dropped into their inbox without having to use any special technology. Of course when they no longer want it they just click the "report as spam" button rather than cancelling.
I am not sure how to get around this as most people really aren't interested in the technology, they just want to read their emails, chat and download music.
