Ten Reasons Why

Good idea, but no. People will think 'Subscribe' means they can get an email newsletter, as for example is available at my site.

Greg, I agree with you and Stephen that 'subscribe' already has too many other connotations, but I also am extremely sympathetic to your quest to move the technology into the background. It would seem like the 'official' term is 'Syndicate' (especially as promoted by Moveable Type in their default 'Syndicate this site' link) but it doesn't feel like that's helping much either.

But how about this thought - in 1995-96 you had news anchors spelling out the 'd-o-t' in web site addresses and people asking 'what's a U-R-L'; less than 3 years latter you had '.com' enter the popular vocabulary, and not just for technophiles. I don't know that the problem is all language here - 'feed' and 'subscribe to this feed' seem like they could work o.k. If the claim being made is that the lack of standard ways of talking about this and presenting feeds is dis-enabling uptake, I'd buy that a little bit, but would still push back that if you look back at web usage adoption, you also had a variety of terminologies ('url' 'homepage' 'address' website') that competed for new users' attention, as well as a number of different browsers they could have chosen, and yet we can now see pretty widespread adoption regardless.

Cheers, scott.

Good comments, Scott. I think that the orange XML box is ridiculously poor user interface design. However, the flaw is in the interaction design, moreso thant the naming convention. When a user clicks on the orange XML box, they are presented with a mishmash of XML and no context for what should be done with that XML unless they have already been initiated into the community of RSS users. The process of copying and pasting the link to the RSS file into a news aggregator* is clumsy and, again, poor user interface design. These are the real problems, and these aren't rectified by replacing an orange XML box with an orange "Subscribe" or "Syndicate" or "Feed" box.

* Yes, I know that with most aggregators I can enter the website's URL into the aggregator and it will frequently discover the RSS feed. But this presumes you have first visited the website or otherwise gleaned gleaned the URL, again introducing an extra step (switching from the browser where the feed is already displayed to the aggregator to re-display it).

What needs to happen when I click on the orange [whatever] box is that I'm presented with a dialog ("Subscribe?" OK or Cancel). When I click OK the feed is added to my aggregator. Badda-bing, badda-boom. No copy-paste, no switching between apps, etc.

I believe this requires a level of interaction between browser and aggregator that doesn't currently exist (certainly not with client-side aggregator tools) or exists proprietarily with web-based or HTML-interfaced aggregators (e.g. the Radio coffee mug or Amphetadesk purple pill).

In fact, I'm almost certain it will first require the RSS/Atom wars to settle down, and it may require a "feed://" protocol or the like, but I'm not technical enough to figure out how this should be implemented. I just know the current method is really inelegant.

You can alleviate the "exploding XML" thing by creating a simple stylesheet for your feeds. That still doesn't change the fact that the URL is meant for something other than a browser, although you could configure your browser to open .rss/.rdf files in your aggregator of choice.

Anthony, you can alleviate your problem with stylesheets and browser configuration. I can probably manage it to. Most users cannot. I've written about this before.

The burden for a usable solution should be on developers of weblog publishing tools, of aggregators, and of browsers . . . although, except for Mozilla, browser development responsive to user needs is unlikely.

The burden should not be on users to jerry-rig a usable solution out of half-assed syndication technology and formats.