Open The Dialogue

Earlier today, I was discussing this post by Robert Scoble on IM with Chris Thilk of Bacon's about how Microsoft and Mozilla folk have gotten together to agree on what an RSS icon would look like across both of the brands' browsers. That's all well and good, but isn't the problem still getting people to click on the button and figure out what it means? Don't tell me there aren't buttons in your browser that you have seen but might never use, especially if you've loaded some toolbars and other software that modifies your browser. I'm still seeing statements like the following from the Microsoft Team RSS Blog:

There are five parts of the experience for feeds in IE7: discovering if a webpage has a feed, previewing the feed, subscribing to the feed to get continual notifications of new items, managing the list of the subscribed feeds, and reading the feed contents. The icon in this post is for the first two parts which shipped in Beta 1. The icon is visible in the IE7 frame to indicate the presence of a feed for the current webpage. Clicking on the feed icon takes the user to readable preview of the feed from which the user can subscribe to it.

This still doesn't address the fact that on every Web page that has an RSS icon, unless it's directed to a particular service (My Yahoo!, etc.), clicking gets you a page that many people I've showed it to describe as "gobbledegook." That's the big issue here. This is like putting a cute little bandage with a kid's favorite cartoon character on a child's leg - but putting it next to the cut. Sure it's cute, the kid likes what it looks like, and the bandage does "work" in covering that portion of skin, but the cut is still there.

I'm not as concerned about browsers using the same button or not, because RARELY are you going to have people who are flipping from Firefox to IE or back and forth unless they're a) developers testing things out, b) not allowed to have another browser on a work/school computer, or c) I'm sure something else could explain this. Additionally, this is also looking at it from the perspective that people would subscribe to RSS feeds *within* their browsing software. What about the My Yahoo! user, the My AOL user, or someone else? There are thousands - perhaps millions - of people who have subscribed to RSS-fed content through those platforms alone who have exactly zero clue that they are utilizing RSS or even what the heck RSS is.

Moreover, bloggers and other online publishers are already using other icons on their pages, ranging from the orange "XML" or "RSS" buttons, to the various buttons FeedBurner offers, to "Syndicate this" to "Subscribe here." I could go on all day. I'm one to think that while it seems like a bigtime pain to get the publishers involved, they're the ones holding the cards (the site visitors) right now, and some sort of simple "What is this?" that could be put next to the feed button/icon that led to some centralized page (Like this one from Six Apart, or Wikipedia, perhaps?) that gave the lowdown on what the feed was, and how a user should utilize it is something I'd love to see. This is a lot less about marketing (read: nifty icons) and more about getting people to grasp what RSS/Atom/other forms of content delivery are all about in the first place.

It's great that two browser powers are getting together on this, and surely they want eyeballs to be within their software while working with blogs, news sources, and RSS feeds, but there are plenty of other places where people might want to subscribe through. Send them to Bloglines, NewsGator, whatever. Just get people educated on the syndication train, and go from there. People are already doing what these folks are talking about - see photo below.

This is an example of one of the feeds I follow through FeedDemon. When I go to any page with a feed, the software pops up an icon in the lower right corner showing me that there is an RSS feed on that page that I might want to subscribe to. This is very helpful for when you're following a thread through blogs or other sources, and you decide you want to subscribe to a site for later viewing. Two important things here, though. I know what I'm doing with feeds, and am using a feed reading tool to do so. The second is that it's not perfect. Sometimes (like in this case) there are multiple feeds on a page, and it doesn't get them all. Let's pretend I'm a "new" feed user or interested party, I still have no idea what I'm doing. What if I happen to stumble upon the PR Newswire site, and click on "RSS" at the top. It takes me to a page with a slew of feeds. Sure, they "describe" RSS on the right, but it still takes a "right click" and a paste into my RSS reader. Oops - what if I'm a Mac user? Sorry, can't right click. What if I don't know what an RSS reader is? Well, I've got to go look that up.

Again, I don't mean to trash the idea here of having some similarity across browsers, but this is a software solution, not a Web solution. Nothing has been solved here, and until people are taught what RSS is and that it's as simple as clicking on any other hyperlink, we'll continue to have this issue.