The Feed Icon—A new visual standard
We agree with Rogers Cadenhead that it is time to break out the icons. The folks over at Mozilla produced an icon to go with RSS feeds in Firefox, the browser alternative. Designed by Stephen Horlander, the icon maintains the prior orange RSS standard but does away with funky acronyms like XML, instead going for a completely visual, logo-like appearance. The icon is definitely a new standard because Microsoft will also be using it in Internet Explorer 7. So as of today, we’ve replaced the “RSS 2.0” links on our three feeds at Manufactured Environments with little Feed Icons.
You may be thinking to yourself: “I want in! I want to be part of this new standard in visual RSS bloggery.” Fortunately there’s a nice little website that contains the new Feed Icon in a bevy of formats and sizes, ranging from itsy 10x10 icons up to the 128x128 monster we have displayed in this blog entry. Oh, yeah, the site is Feed Icons - Help establish the new standard. If you’ve got a blog, we encourage you to use the icons for your feed(s).
If you’re saying to yourself: “What the funk is RSS?” Then we say to you: “Ah-ha! Not to worry! We’ll be back to the not-so-technical topics soon. Hang in there!”
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This is not a comment about Manufactured Environment's implementation (which is excellent) of Matt's icon, but rather about the ways I have seen this icon used on other sites.
Some sites have simply replaced their text links or orange RSS/XML buttons with this icon without any explanatory text or labels. While a completely visual, logo-like appearance might appeal to those already in the know, its use sans any kind of label will not help increase the use of RSS feeds by the 96% of the people who don't know what they are. In fact, it might hinder folks who know what a feed is but don't know about the new icon. Perhaps a version of the icon with a label would help in some of these cases.
Also, I suspect the different behaviors experienced when the clicking the icon on a web page and clicking the icon in the browser will confuse many users. For example, in Firefox, clicking on the icon at the bottom of my browser window allows me to "Add Live Bookmark of this page's feed." Based on this experience, why should I think that this is the same icon I should look for when I want to subscribe to a podcast with ITunes? It seems that it might have been more helpful to have standardized what users should expect when they click on such an icon before standardizing the look of the icon.
I take the Feed icon to be intended to be a link to the feed. Of course, there are a variety of ways of implementing that. Some people, particularly WordPress users, link to their feeds with the feed:// URI prefix. Clicking such a link in Firefox produces an error. Not very friendly. In my opinion the link should at least go somewhere. I like having the Manufactured Environments feeds at FeedBurner because they use XSL to style the feed and make it more friendly to the end user, especially the person who doesn't know what an XML-based subscription feed is.
I agree that Feedburner would seem to be the best of those options.