Nick, your vision of a new browser/reader is a good one.

Andrea, not to worry. My inspiration for this post came while you were busy with the LeWeb conference. Who knew it would hit such a nerve? I would love your additional take on all of this. I think there is lots of thinking/discussion still to do.

First thing: sorry if I couldn’t join the conversation before but I had a reeeally intense time during and after LeWeb.

Tons of inspiring things on this page, which basically means that I will probably record another episode about RSS.
I’ll link back to you and to this post Connie

Keep up the great work!

Andrea

When I open my browser the default behaviour is to open a MyFeeds tab (”behind” my home page tab).

This page is an aggregation of the most recent x items from the feeds linked in my y most visited pages with autodiscover links - displayed in classic reader style. This immediately satisfies the majority who do not currently know how to subscribe to and manage feeds.

For the curious and power users, there is also a prominent Manage My Feeds button which allows us to change the default settings, group the feeds etc, or to specify a preferred alternative reader.

Yet RSS is very useful. One solution is to use RSS in other ways as a ‘behind-the-scenes’ service. For example, I found this discussion through LibWorm http://www.libworm.com/ Another example - the ticTOCs Journal Tables of Contents Service http://www.tictocs.ac.uk which ingests RSS, but you don’t need to know the fisrt thing about RSS in order to find, view and keep up-to-date with journal Tables of Contents.
RSS can be a tool. We don’t need to force it down people’s throats as a techniques.

At the moment, the feed button is just this unexplained orange square in the UI. What does it do? Nobody knows. So a little bit of education is necessary about the point and, unfortunately, a little education is needed about how to get a reader (although I believe IE7 has one built in, I can’t confirm that).

You probably can’t get this education done in a single word. Maybe not even in a single sentence. Two sentences? Maybe. A series of pictures? Even better. Ditching RSS as a term is a good idea. RSS is a single technology, not the concept (for example, Atom does the same thing). The user doesn’t need to know the format of the feed.

“Enjoy this blog? Hate having to check for updates yourself? Feeds let you read the latest updates on all your favourite sites in one place. Click the unexplained orange square or learn more.”

As for implementation, I’m not sure it could get much simpler than it is in Firefox: click the orange square, choose your reader from the dropdown, click Subscribe. The Firefox implementation could be laid out a little better (I’d rather have a list than a dropdown) but it’s otherwise almost easy as can be. I think that whatever you do to the implementation, the subscription part should involve only the browser and the reader and only clicking (no copy & paste, typing or dragging unless you’re trying to do something special).

As Steve Matthews notes, tools that librarians can use to set up high-value feeds for our patrons help make the case. For example, using Yahoo Pipes to pull together a set of feeds — and filtering it for specific keywords — for a patron is relatively easy for the expert and of great benefit to the user.

Showing RSS has always been easier than explaining it. At least that’s been my experience. I’ve always had more luck crafting a small pre-made collection of feeds, and handing off a seeded reader than, than trying to persuade someone of the value to their lives.

Just some thoughts, anyway. Great post Connie, I’m glad to see such an active conversation stream on the topic. Very cool.