Tom Raftery’s Social Media

Robert Scoble has written a post bemoaning the lack of standards in using RSS feeds and the consequent confusion which this causes :

Some sites use RSS icons. Most that I visit use the orange XML icon. But other sites don’t have any icon and instead use words like “subscribe� or “feed� or “web feed.�

There’s a great discussion in the comments of Robert’s post on this issue - with some making the point that auto-discovery in IE7 will solve the problem and others countering that if you want to add the feed to an online reader like Google Reader or Netvibes, then autodiscovery won’t resolve that problem.

We had a very fruitful discussion on that topic here a few weeks back, after Dave Winer suggested that we use a Subscribe button.

What we came up with was a combination of an orange Subscribe button and a Help button - thanks to FrankP’s generosity these buttons and the Help text are free to copy and use on other sites.

Robert - you obviously didn’t either 1) read the discussion or 2) read the discussion and forgot about it - I’m hurt