Rogers Cadenhead put
together this amusing graphic that I think illustrates quite well the need for a standard icon to subscribe to an RSS
feed. He's got a good overview of
the movement towards widespread support of the Mozilla orange broadcast button."The benefits of syndication are still a hard sell for non-technical people, seven years after Dan Libby of Netscape published the first format called RSS," he says. "The use of a common icon and jargon-free language like 'subscribe to a feed' have the potential to make things considerrably easier." He points out that IE 7 supports RSS but makes no mention of the word RSS.
I disagree that the benefits of syndication are hard to sell to non-technical people. This may be true in the abstract, but I think that a visual demonstration quickly convinces anyone who uses the web a lot of the benefits of reading feeds. The move towards simplicity in rhetoric sounds like a good idea, though I worry about a coresponding move towards simplicity in use. Reading RSS feeds through browser tabs, for example, seems like a real loss in functionality.
And I gotta confess that I really like that heart icon!
1. Why don't we just call them "Web Feeds," and use "WF" as the acronym? Or just say "Web Feeds." It's got the same number of syllables as "RSS."
Or, if you wanted to have some fun, you could call them "Web Technology Feeds."
Posted at 7:59AM on Mar 4th 2006 by Joe Murphy