RSS Icons Standardized and Irony Embodied
With Microsoft caving in and adopting the quickly standardizing RSS orange icon, it was just a matter of time before a pretty site that helps people out by giving the icon out in a variety of formats appeared.
I think it's great. I read 300+ feeds myself and its dramatically increased the amount of really good content I can read in the amount of time I have available. However, I think it's hilarious in a non-Alanis ironic kind of way that the way you "stay in the loop" is . . . to give them your email address. They even comment on how much they hate spam as much as you do. Yet, no RSS or Atom feed in the metadata for autodiscovery, and the pinnacle of this ironic mountain is that none of the 10 feed icons (including the big one and the favicon.ico) actually links to a feed.
It just goes to show my oft-repeated point that the first thing people try to do with new technology is do things the old way. "Look at this new feed stuff. It's great. You can keep up with sites easily and subscribe to them. You want to keep up with this site? Email of course." Would you like a buggy whip with your new Model T?
December 27th, 2005 at 2:03 pm
I think this site is a little ridiculous. I'm all about a standard, but with IE adopting the icon, doesn't that essentially standardize it? It will now gain universal recognition and it's probably a lot easier for Joe Blogger to copy this image than to figure out what technology Wordpress/MoveableType/Textpattern is powering his feed and create a corresponding ugly button. I don't mean to pee in anyone's Cheerios, but does this site really serve to promote the icon or to attach someone's name to something they didn't even create?
December 28th, 2005 at 8:31 am
The site is ridiculous. (I just re-read and it's not clear that I think standard icons are great, not the site). In the long run, all of this stuff will just disappear into the background. I already don't bother even looking for the icon on the page if Firefox doesn't show the icon, which it gets via autodiscovery from the metadata in the page. Eventually, that will be how this stuff gets picked up. Just give your reader of choice the URL of the page and it will figure out the feed portion on its own.
I'd be surprised if the site itself wasn't just a traffic whoring move to build up someone's portfolio: a way to get a "Web 2.0" kind of site in front of a lot of eyeballs and try to leverage it into more work.