RSS common icon proposal

Been participating in this thread over at The Shifted Librarian. The gist: the RSS Advisory Board is considering a proposal that would add official support for the common feed icon to the official RSS spec, and additionally actively encourge everyone who publishes a feed to use the icon regardless of what type of feed (RSS, RDF, Atom) they publish. I think this is a pretty bad idea, at least for the moment. I’ve laid out my objections over there, so I’ll just recap here:

I think it’s far too early for this. Let the market settle on a protocol first, and then worry about marketing it. Presenting feeds as a single concept or technology hides a whole host of technological and compatibility issues that will become “out of sight, out of mind” if people don’t have to constantly choose between “rss” and “xml” buttons. If we ever want to see feeds turn into technology that’s anything but beta, we need to keep users as annoyed as possible.

That’s the theoretical objection. I also have a practical objection:

Until bandwidth becomes both unlimited and free, knowing the content of a feed–or any page–will remain important. I look on a common feed icon the way I look at links to PDF, flash, and word files that aren’t clearly marked [pdf], [swf], or [.doc] in the main text of the article I’m reading. That is, not kindly.

Ideally, of course, the software will provide the user with the relevant information (assuming the feed publisher has handled the enclosure tags correctly), and most probably will. But I’d still rather see some content distinctions buitl into the rfc. What will sites that publish several feeds do? Take a site like www.evilgeniuschronicles.org, for instance. Dave publishes an rss 2.0 (text) feed, a bittorrent podcast feed, a driect download podcast feed, and a videoblog feed. Right now it’s preety clear: you click the xml button for text, one of the podcast buttons for audio, and the videoblog button for video. Should he replace all thouse buttons with four identical generic feed buttons? That seems like a recipe for confusion.

Sure, there will be text next to the buttons to clarify, but the buttons aren’t there for people who read all the text. The nice thing about the current profusion of symbols is that they provide extra-textual clues for those of us who skim a little now and then. If I have to read the explanation to figure out the button I need, the button doesn’t serve a purpose at all; it’s redundant.

At the very least, there should be the (xml) feed button, something like Apple’s podcast icon for audio, and another variation with a tv or something for video. [thread]

I’m not against the idea, in the long term. It’s just an idea whose time has not yet come. If nothing else, the spec should encourage people to combine the icon with descriptive text to form a single entity that can be used as a button. Something like these.

Internet Identity Workshop 2006

Phil Windley posted the public announcement for IIW 2006 this morning. This year’s event will be held May 2nd & 3rd at the Computer History Museum in Mountainview, CA, and will feature a new format. Since the subject is developing so rapidly at the moment–it seems like every day a new service adopts OpenID, and YADIS is releasing specs several times a month, and claims to have a 1.0 spec ready–that there will be no prepared schedule or program. Participants will propose talks and round tables on the wiki (coming soon), and then everyone will get together the morning of the 2nd and decide who’s talking about what when.

Happy Pi Day!

Yes, you heard me. It’s Π Day! 3.14. Feel free to celebrate at 1:59 (AM or PM, your choice) or 3:09 (15:[0]9), whatever suits your fancy. Celebratory times, in honor of Pi Day’s most famous birthday boy, may be GMT or based on your current locale’s position relative to the sun.

I’d completely forgotten about Pi Day until this morning, which is a shame. I’d intended to bake up an apple crisp or something in a 9×9 pan. Why? Because on Pi Day, “pie are squared”.

For those who say “but this isn’t a real holiday,” I have this: if Halmark can have holidays, why not geeks? Speaking of which, mark Towel Day on your calendar now.

LII under the knife

I just read some disturbing news over at the Shifted Librarian, and the fact that I’m several days behind on my reading doesn’t make it any less disturbing. Apparently the Librarian’s Internet Index is facing at 50% budget cut next year. If you aren’t familiar with the LII–and really if you aren’t, you should be–they are a publically-funded (at least until 30 June 2006) team of librarians in California who put out a weekly newsletter of a few dozen websites on all topics that they vett and assert to be of high quality, each with a short description/review. The project also maintains a searchable, constantly updated, archive of more than 18,000 “websites you can trust”.

LII has been online since it began life in the early 1990′s as a gopher bookmark and currently boasts 10 million monthly page hits and 35,000 newsletter subscribers throughout “California, Washington state, the nation, and the world.”

Swing by the site and take their survey (online through the 16th), particularly if your a user. The budget is in, but they’re trying to figure out alternative funding sources and they want to know how people fell about the various options. Personally, I think a “donate via PayPal” button would be a good start.