I never could understand why anyone would think RSS is dead. Blogs, sites and podcasts leverage RSS to blast out updates and notifications.
RSS is just underlying protocol. You might as well say 'http' is going away. It will someday, but not anytime in the near future.
Not sure when it was alive. My circle of friends includes some people who I'd consider fairly technical people including a lot of programmers (as a percentage) and I'm the only one who uses an RSS reader. Some people use Twitter but no one uses an RSS reader. I often ask candidates during interviews if they read any blogs and only one person over the years has ever said yes and he used Google Reader to keep up with it all.
Seems to me the number of people using RSS readers isn't even that important - RSS is infrastructure, most of its users aren't even aware of it (eg, various "latest stories at.." widgets). The annual "RSS Is Dead" posts would be meaningful when/if we see a decline in content publishers supporting it, rather than browsers developers.
A more interesting statistic here would be to compare these metrics with those of a more neutral demographic more representative of mainstream internet traffic since readers of AVC are going to be significantly more adept at something like RSS than say, a tmz.com reader.