However when you have one short link or button to communicate what the hell your XML feed is… then you’re in trouble.

That’s why I’ve changed mine to ‘subscribe’ and included a little help button along with it.

I’m not advocating changing the name of RSS, I’m just advocating using more understandable terminology when referring to it in difficult situations.

It really doesn’t matter that a new feed is born every nano second or whatever – loads of people don’t know what those little orange buttons are! I want them to know, so I am doing everything I can to help them understand RSS.

And I think that’s what Piaras is getting at too…

RSS has lower name recognition and use despite the prevalence of blogs.

When you sign up to a new RSS feed do you say I signed up to a new RSS feed or feed? This is espeicially evident for sites that offer multiple feeds, ie RTE Business, Sport, Entertainment, etc. I say I signed up to the Business feed, not the Business RSS feed. (Note that Ed’s original post included the fact that web will be interchangeable for things like News feeds, etc)

RSS isn’t a doomed technology, it’s transforming the way we use the web. It won’t go mainstream for about two years though until Vista comes out.

Theer is a growing number of people changing the RSS icon on their page to the FeedBurner icon that reads Feeds as far as I remember, so I’m not the only “simple and stupid” person out there I think.

I was at a training day yesterday and one of the things we discussed were the general news mediums. One thing that was pointed out was the 9 o’clock news use short and simple words because the audience might not be university educated. Industry experts are constantly told to use understandable language, it doesn’t matter if they’re on Morning Ireland or the 9 o’clock news.

Just look at the Irish Internet situation, you either have broadband or dial-up, the general public don’t mention Ethernet, DSL, ASDL2+, etc.

I think this is going to be something that we have to agree to disagree on. It turned out my rewrite wasn’t that short and sweet, I’d hate to have seen the original now

All I wanted to say was that Web Feeds is a fine name for what RSS does. Who really cares what I call it or whether marketing people prefer catchy names? (Tiger is a catchy name – OS X 10.4 isn’t).

I doubt my calling it Web Feeds is going to make any noticable difference – but I’m going to do it because I find it gets a better response. You can’t argue with me on that – I’ve tried to explain RSS to many non-tech people, and when I start saying Web Feeds instead, they just seem to grasp it easier.

An RSS feed created every minute is pervasive. The fact that Google has created a search feature for it highlights this. The fact that another major search engines (MSN) is presenting serarch results as RSS feeds shows it is pervasive.

What does XP, VISTA, NT and Tiger bring to explaining what that technology does? Your own argument above for Webfeeds was because it better explains the technology to the customer and speaks in their language and that RSS couldn’t do that. Can you tell me how XP and Tiger explains things to the customer in their language?

RSS IS NOT PERVASIVE. Check your facts.

If you think naming mean’s nothing then you’re just on a different planet to most people. Why do MS spend millions naming and marketing Windows (98 … XP … Vista)? Why does Apple call OS X 10.4 ‘Tiger’? Would it be to make it easier and more memorable to everyone?

Know your web history. Look at the first description of what the web was and what it was built on. Read up on Tim Berners Lee. In it’s first incarnation it was called the Web. There was no way people would have said they were “surfing the HTML”. Your analogy is still wrong.

“To be fair Damien, your trolling now”

No, I’m being accused of trolling so you can somehow justify that yourself and your friend’s stupid argument that renaming RSS will suddenly be its the tipping point. Damn, maybe we should rename trolling, because some people don’t understand what it is from its name alone.

“explaining Web Feeds to someone is easier than RSS – because it makes sense to them.”

If you explain what web feeds are then you are explaining the concept of rss anyway. The concept is important not the name. Renaming it to a webfeed, a feed on the web, will mean nothing unless you explain what it can do.

Television is understood by a few billion people. A TV Channel is understood by billions too. Did they need a better name to understand what it did? RSS is so pervasive that it doesn’t need a bored marketing person to come up with a better name. RSS, webfeeds, platypus – it won’t matter a damn by name alone. It is what it allows you do to that matters. A rose is still a rose no matter how you name it.

‘That’s an RSS feed created every second’
- That’s true, but being created and being USED are very different. There was a survey recently (I tried Google’ing it but to no avail – sorry) about how many people know what and blog is and read a blog, and also how many know what RSS is. Turns out the majority of blog readers DON’T use RSS.

‘Do we need to rename blogs too before the public grasps on to them? Do we need to rename iPods or MP3 Players? Do Ford’s need to rename cars as fuel powered transportation vehicles before people buy them’
- To be fair Damien, your trolling now.

I actually know a number of people who not only KNOW what a blog is, but actually BLOG THEMSELVES, and can’t grasp RSS. Don’t even consider calling them idiots – there just not technology people – an orange XML icon means nothing to them.

‘HTML is not the web.’
- No it’s not, but it it’s first incarnation it could easily have been called that. The Internet is TCP/IP network of computers. Usenet was not the web. HTML created the Web – it enabled Web Browsers. So at that time HTML pages would have been more appropriate than Web pages. Now, of course, that would be crazy – with CSS, XML, SQL, JavaScript and so on.

The whole point is ADOPTION. We are evangelists of RSS technology. Through my experience, explaining Web Feeds to someone is easier than RSS – because it makes sense to them. Fair enough, if we stick with RSS and it keeps growing the way it’s growing, then yeah, it’ll be fine, everyone will have heard of it, just like MP3, but that’s a few years off.