Dave Winer is concerned about people trying to sidestep using the RSS name and in particular the orange XML icon to identify a link to an RSS feed. He’s gone as far as rattling his former employee and friend, Robert Scoble who responds:

Inch by inch, but as “RSS team coach” you gotta help me fight the RSS battles. Attacking me isn’t helping our cause. It isn’t helping move the RSS football down the field. It’s increasing the noise. Where there’s noise, engineers and PM’s stop listening.

Mike Torres, who works on the MSN Spaces team, seemed to take Winer’s comments personally last week switched gears yesterday and conducted an enlightening little three minute research on how Firefox, Bloglines, Newsgator Online and Six Apart (LiveJournal, Typepad, Movable Type) are identifying RSS / Atom feeds to users.

No matter what anybody else says, if Internet Explorer comes out with good, clear ways of identifying to the user that an RSS/Atom feed exists for a given page/site then that’s a step in the right direction. I hope that’s the goal, and it sure seems that way.

I think the term ‘RSS’ or ‘Atom’ (or both) somewhere on the page *does* serve some people (mostly early adopters admittedly) — in the fact that if the blogger doesn’t use the auto discovery code in the head, a simple CTRL + F in the browser to find the RSS feed somewhere in the source or on the all too often crowded blog page works pretty well.

Hasn’t anybody reading this ever struggled *trying* to find an RSS/Atom feed on a page/site? Naming conventions aside, just imagine in those scenarios how difficult it is for the would-be subscribers who don’t know how or where to even begin looking?

This is a webmaster/website discussion though: make the RSS/Atom feed somewhere easy to find. You see sites with huge gaudy logos and the RSS/Atom feed is buried or not even linked somewhere on the page.

A screenshot of MakeYouGoHmm RSS feed location is shown at the top of this post. It doesn’t require scrolling at 1028×768 resolution to see the subscription section for this blog which contains links to various RSS aggregators. Along the right side of the home page are RSS feed links for most the categories (a few need to be added still). It was important for me to include this information somewhere important and visible because I would actually like people to subscribe and read.

If I wanted people to never subscribe then I’d remove those links or bury them somewhere else on the page. It’s really pretty easy to draw a visitor’s attention away from something. It’s much harder to draw their attention to something.

Having the word RSS or Atom somewhere on the page preferably or in the source at least as a meta or comment will definitely help people actually subscribe via RSS or Atom.

Then again, maybe some people don’t care if they have any subscribers. In that case we might as well call it Really Sad Syndication or A Thing Of Misses.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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