Dave Winer wrote an entry yesterday titled "The solution to the Yahoo problem"
Yahoo sends emails to bloggers with RSS feeds saying, hey if you put this icon on your weblog you'll get more subscribers. It's true you will. Then Feedster says the same thing, and Bloglines, etc etc. Hey I did it too, back when Radio was pretty much the only show in town, you can see the icon to the right, if you click on it, it tries to open a page on your machine so you can subscribe to it. I could probably take the icon down by now, most Radio users probably are subscribed to Scripting News, since it is one of the defaults. But it's there for old time sake, for now.
Anyway, all those logos, when will it end? I can't imagine that Microsoft is far behind, and then someday soon CNN is going to figure out that they can have their own branded aggregator for their own users (call me if you want my help, I have some ideas about this) and then MSNBC will follow, and Fox, etc. Sheez even Best Buy and Circuit City will probably have a "Click here to subscribe to this in our aggregator" button before too long.
Now, from the point of view of Yahoo, there's no problem at all: there's free advertising, ease of use, so on and so forth. For CNN through Circuit City, the "problem" is that they didn't get there first, but boy, they'd love to be there (hypothetically speaking, of course).
From the point of view of information provider, it's a pain in the arse to provide all the appropriate icons. That is, assuming they're needed. Maybe you don't care if it's easy for people using the Circuit City aggregator to read your content or maybe there's a better way to do this anyway.
From the point of viewer of the reader, esthetically it's ugly and if your aggregator didn't make it to the list, you're ... hypothetically speaking, again ... back to cut and paste of URLs.
The reason I'm saying hypothetically is that there's already a great way to do this without creating some sort of centralized database, specializing URLs or whatever: drag and drop. I'm tooting my own horn here, but there's no reason that desktop should not provide the same service we do. Here's how we do subscription in Sparks! and Jäger:
That's it and that's all you should have to do. Our applications are smart enough to figure where the aggregation feed is and if there's ambiguity, you'll be further prompted. We don't even care if you get the home page (of a blog) or whatever, we've got about a 95% success rate figuring out "what you really mean" from any archive link on a blog. The only requirement on the part of the information provider is to add a "<link>" tag in the HTML header.
There's no need for those ugly RSS feed buttons – "my blog provides RSS brand syndication" is not much different that "my house use Ontario Power brand electricity". Who cares? RSS should be so everywhere there should be no need to point out its presence.
This doesn't cut out online aggregators either, though it's not as pretty. A Flash or Java drop target could be provided for dropping URLs, which I hope should do the trick.
Further comments:
- Phil Ringnalda – with something that sounds about as complicated than Dave's idea
- Ross Rader – who apparently is in Circuit City's boat and thinks it's a good idea
Addendum
If you're all really committed to making special markup to indicate RSS feeds, just make it "http://rsssubscribe?url=http://www.example.com/index.xml" and online aggregators and desktop aggregators can add an "rsssubscribe" entry /etc/hosts to redirect to your aggregator flavor. And you can still have Bryan Bell to design a cool icon.