Here’s another technology being given the Real Time Web treatment: RSS. There’s PubSubHubbub (PuSH), created by the mother of all search engines and there’s rssCloud, created by the father of RSS. You can tell just by the people behind both projects that this is a Big Deal.
I won’t get into the technical details—mostly because I can’t—but these two protocols are built on the same idea of push notifications instead of pull, which is the current setup. Feed aggregators won’t have to check every now and then for any updates; they’ll come right in when they’re published.
The score seems to be in PubSubHubbub’s favor right now, and it certainly calls attenion based on name alone. But Dave Winer had the idea as early as 2001. And who knows what will happen in the next few months.
What matters is the feed reading system is getting a much needed upgrade especially with all this talk of it being dead. RSS? Dead?
Like Bwana, I scoff at people who run through the streets proclaiming “RSS is dead! Long live Twitter!” Aside from the obvious non-parallel comparison between a protocol and a web app, he explains it nicely:
Those who claim RSS is dead don’t realize their newfound love for Twitter would be moot if it were not for RSS. Breaking news on Twitter comes from two main sources in my mind: websites and personal experience. For tech news, I doubt there is much personal experience for news unless there’s a conference or an event. Most juicy, 0-day news comes from websites. These websites often have a… wait for it… RSS feed. The race to post tech news first on Twitter usually stems from who can refresh their RSS reader the fastest.
So here’s to RSS: I’m not sure what the Web would do without you. Pretty sure that’s how many feel about Twitter too, but let’s talk again when it goes from webapp/API level down to the protocol level. And when it scales properly, of course.
Postscript: Both PuSH and rssCloud support Atom. RSS and Atom are both feed delivery mechanisms, but you won’t see people yelling “feeds are dead!” or “Atom is dead!”, as they have ignored any distinctions among the three for ages now. So for the sake of simplicity I mentioned only RSS above.
In an effort to raise awareness about syndication on the Web, Daily Blog Tips has started campaigning for another online event: RSS Awareness Day, which happens on May 1st.
Now I have got to wonder why we have to be so specific and tackle only RSS feeds and not feeds and syndication in general. Why call it RSS Awareness Day when it should be called Feed Awareness Day instead?
And they wonder why
Copyblogger asks, “will RSS ever go mainstream?” Again, that’s asking the wrong question! It’s like explaining how Gmail works, instead of how email does. And they’re wondering why very few people are using RSS—correction—feeds.
Eliminate the confusion
Choosing to shine the spotlight on RSS alone becomes another obstacle to actually understanding—and not just becoming aware of—web feeds. It confuses the very people we want to educate.
RSS is a standard, not the standard. The default feed format for WordPress blogs may be RSS, but on Blogger, it’s Atom. You can’t even guarantee that blog platforms offer RSS feeds. How will you explain that to people who unwittingly discover this fact? And how will you explain all the other buttons that are not labeled RSS, but XML, Atom, or RDF instead? You’d be opening an unnecessary can of worms.
Some friendly reminders:
- RSS is a feed format.
- RSS stands for several things, including “Really Simple Syndication”, “RDF Site Summary”, and “Rich Site Summary”
- (Note: RDF stands for Resource Document Format.)
- RSS is a feed format written in XML.
- (Note: XML stands for Extensible Markup Language.)
- Atom is another feed format.
- (Note: Atom stands for nothing.)
If you’ve been on the Web long enough you might appreciate all these acronyms, but ordinary people don’t. Do them a favor and make it simple for them. Do not recite the list above to them (that was just there for your geeky pleasure). Just explain what you can do with a feed, and how easy it is to use.
Awareness, truth, simplicity
The feed icon is a standard for not just RSS, but all types of web feeds. And just as this icon has helped us understand feeds in a symbolic, abstracted way, we should do the same for those who haven’t understood yet.
Please, if you’re going to start a campaign about awareness for normal people, convince them how easy it is for them to participate. Don’t geek it up. Do it right.
The Web would be much more chaotic than it already is without standards. Today we’re going to talk about how various content on the web is being represented by standardized icons. Several groups of people have come together and agreed upon these simple yet distinct icons for identifying syndicated, OPML, geotagged, shareable content.
It’s interesting to note how these standardized icons emerged. The OPML, geotag, and open share icons all base their design on the feed icon. They each consist of a white symbol on a square box with rounded corners. The boxes have a subtle diagonal gradient and an inner border which gives a slightly beveled effect.
Feed Icon
The feed icon was introduced to us by Mozilla and is used for syndicated feeds in either RSS or Atom. You can instantly infer that it stands for a signal being beamed to the rest of the world. This icon is so popular that it has been transformed in so many ways to match websites and tastes. (It’s even been turned into a real-life pillow!) But now matter how many bells and whistles designers add onto it, the icon is a much more comforting sight than other buttons and chicklets labeled XML, RSS, Atom, My Yahoo!, Bloglines, or whatnot. Icons say so much more than words than obscure acronyms—which ordinary Internet users don’t even understand. They don’t need to!
Visit the feed icon page.
OPML Icon
Related to feeds is OPML, which is an XML format for outlines. Its popular use right now is listing a group of feeds. Think feed reader reading lists and blogrolls. They can easily be shared with the OPML document format. Compared to the feed icon, the OPML icons is not as meaningful, but it’s still catchy especially since it looks like an “O”.
Visit the OPML icon page.
Geotag Icon
Geotagging is basically adding geographical information to certain content, such as photos, through a link. The geotag icon is a pushpin on a globe, which stands for pointing out a certain location in the world. It’s a really good symbol (though if you read Jeremy Keith’s tweet you might think differently from now on). It’s just that the globe looks too small for the pushpin.
Visit the Geotag icon page.
Open Share Icon
You might have heard about the Share Icon, which came from Alex King’s excellent plugin, ShareThis. We’ve talked about the service here on Wisdump not too long ago, but there’s been a controversy surrounding the use of the share icon itself. Thus, the Open Share Icon Project was formed to address such limitations.
The open share icon shows a hand passing an object to another hand. It also looks like an eye. This is much more descriptive than the share icon, which is a node branching out into two like a binary tree, if you’re familiar with Computer Science, and feels too tech-y for the mainstream crowd. A star could have been an easy choice for an icon, since it’s used in both Internet Explorer and Flock to denote “favorites” or bookmarks, but the act of sharing isn’t conveyed with it.
Visit the Open Share Icon page.
More Standard Icons?
Are there any more standard icons out there? The Microformats project has put together several icons that can be used for such. Semantic Web, anyone?
What sort of actions and content on the web actually need icons like these? File uploads and downloads? Email addresses? Tags? Asking these questions makes me want to discover what the next generation of web technologies will give us. It could be something we haven’t even imagined before.
Steal These Icons
If these icons aren’t used, they’re all for naught. We all want some consistency on the web, especially it’s made of tons of information constantly being created each second. Especially when the technologies that provide this information are still very new. Using these icons means turning data into more meaningful and properly labeled content we can all identify and understand more easily.
I almost got feed fatigue (does anyone use that expression?) yesterday. It was my first day back at work, and it consisted solely of answering e-mails and scanning my RSS feeds, which amassed to 1,000+ stories, which in reality was more like 10,000+ stories!
Now, I’m a harsh RSS user. If I don’t find myself following up on posts in a subscription, I cancel it. Having too many feeds in the feed reader is just stressful. However, I still have a fair amount of sources, so they got piled up over the holidays.
Three things struck me, when scanning the feeds.
- I clicked through more often on partial feeds.
- Images does work in feeds as well, not just in post.
- It sucks to read in a feed reader, but it sucks even more to read in an ugly designed site.
Mayhap not the most stunning revelations of 2008, but nevertheless, they were painfully obvious when I had to handle so much content.
I prefer my feeds like I prefer my content listings, with read more links and images to lighten them up. In other words, I don’t want to read 50 paragraphs in my feed reader, more like five and then if I’m hooked I’ll click through. Add an image and you’re more likely to succeed.
How do you prefer your feeds?
A recent interview at Daily Blog Tips showcased the thoughts of Coding Horror’s Jeff Atwood on RSS. It was an interesting viewpoint, and one that got me thinking.
RSS is a technology; it should be completely invisible to the average user. When it isn’t, you get stuff like Oprah redefining RSS as “Ready for Some Stories”. We should no sooner have RSS icons than we have HTTP icons.
The question I come to is: How necessary is it to display an RSS icon on a website? I’ve never really thought about it in depth before. After all, so many blogs and websites do it. It seems natural. And with the pros leaning that direction, what other example do we have to follow?
Practically the source of classy, relevant web tips and practice on the web, A List Apart features a link to their RSS feed in their main menu.
Easily the #1 model for thousands of bloggers, ProBlogger has a link to subscribe to their content displayed prominently above the fold.
The Feed Reader (no, the human kind)
At first glance, it seems there are two type of readers when it comes to RSS:
- Those who use it, and therefore don’t really need the icons and
- Those who don’t use RSS and don’t really care that there’s an icon on the page.
Granted, there are gray areas on the spectrum. There are those who use feeds but need to be reminded of their availability (though I don’t know why), as well as those who don’t use feeds but will after enough visual training.
Honestly, the whole issue makes me think of those Valid CSS and Valid XHTML buttons that I used to see every once and a while. I always think those are silly and unnecessary. Now I’m beginning to see feed icons in the same light.
Standard Technology and Non-standard Visuals
I recognize that an RSS icon standard does exist, to an extent, but there is still a lot of creative liberty taken across the web. As Atwood alludes to in his quote above, at some point this showing off of different versions of the icon becomes just that—showboating. How necessary is it?
Everyone does it—heck, I do it—so I can’t really talk. But at one point that was the case with table elements. So what excuses do we really have? And, more importantly, how long before this fad fades out, just like the rest have?
