Speaking of Matt MacAllister - he’s got a public request that I’d like to pass along.

In his post Mainstreaming RSS subscription user interfaces- Matt brings up the research results that Yahoo has dsicovered and verified on the whole issue of what to name these little subscribe chiclets.

We ran into a similar problem when trying to figure out how toname the ‘ReBlog’, ‘Post this’, “Blog This’ chiclet. We now call the standard ‘ReDirectThis’ - but we still have no solution as to the problem of “what to call a universal BLOG THIS button“. Well I guess I just did. I guess Blogger set the standard with that one.

This is the same debate that went on a while ago on whether Microsoft should call their little orange buttons “Web Feeds” (or something like that.) This is a problem that needs a solution.

I really like the synergy going on here - between Matt’s Social Media Tools, RedirectThis (and her sister service OutputThis) and what Microsoft’s trying to do - and humanize the whole chiclet thing.

Take a look at the Syndicate page. It’s a nightmare! Sure - it’s a conference on Syndication technologies and formats - but my God - there are 6 different chicelets for huamns to choose from! Who are they kidding? Is someone supposed to understand that?

This conference is to encourage people to use RSS and subscription technlogires, not scare them away.

So anyway - as for Matt’s question, I say called it ‘Web Feeds’. Let Microsoft set the standard. Wouldn’t that be the ‘open thing’ to do? Yah gotta throw bones both ways - to keep everybody happy. And let’s go with ‘Blog This’ as the redirect chiclet standard. I’m sure Sergei and Larry won’t mind.

That’s Canter’s Law #1.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 20th, 2005 at 9:54 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.