The IEBlog has a three part series on how to use IE7 Beta 2 as your feed reader.

• Part 1: Hello feeds
• Part 2: Discovery and Subscribe
• Part 3: Read and Manage

If you’re a seasoned veteran of consuming RSS feeds, IE7 probably won’t offer you any compelling reasons to switch from you current reader.  However, if you’re a newbie to the world of RSS IE7 might be good place to start.

It’s also important to mention that RSS feed reading could change by the time the final IE7 product is released, so hopefully there will be some changes.

Scott Karp has suggested that IE7’s RSS Is a Glorified “Favorites” Feature and I couldn’t agree more.  After an initial evaluation of the IE7 beta, my overal impression is that the RSS support is no better than that of Safari, Opera or Firefox.  This type of support is probably fine for those who subscribe to a very limited number of feeds.  If you subscribe to more than 10 feeds you’re still better off using a true RSS aggregator like NewsGator, RSSOwl, Google Reader, NetNewsWire, etc.

The place Microsoft has truely improved the RSS experience is in the way they have styled RSS feeds.  When you click on an RSS link, you are presented with a nicely styled page that discusses the benefits of subscribing to RSS.  This will go a long way to helping the average Internet user embrace the RSS technology, and maybe lead to a greater use.

Feed Icons is a new project to promote and establish the use of a standard feed/rss icon. You can download the icon that is being used by Firefox and IE in a convenient zip file that includes variations in AI, EPS, SVG, PSD, PDF, PNG, JPG, and GIF formats.

I think this project is great and plan on supporting it, however, I have a problem with the icon being offered in varying colors. If the icon is to become a standard, shouldn’t it always be in the same color? Your thoughts?

Google has provided a Add to Google button feature that can easily be integrated onto your blog or other site that offers RSS feeds. By placing an “Add to Google” button to your website your visitor will have an easier time adding you feed to their Google homepage or Google Reader. Not to be outdone, Yahoo! offers a similar feature.

Firefox! That’s right, the Microsoft team has decided to use Firefox’s RSS Icon in Internet Explorer 7! I think this is good for RSS in general, and congratulations to Microsoft for doing the “good” thing. A unified icon will go far for furthering the adoption and use of RSS.

It was a big day of announcements from Microsoft today:

1. Really Simple Sharing
2. Standardizing the Microsoft Office Open XML formats
3. Windows Live Custom Domains

Here is a quick summary of each announcement:

Really Simple Sharing is a pretty important announcement. It represents a very important contribution by Microsoft’s XML/RSS team that adds extensions to the RSS markup language. These extensions essentially turn RSS into a bi-directional technology that will help the process of synchronizing RSS and OPML. This is important as it will make it easier to use RSS and OPML between multiple applications, platforms, operating systems and users. This is a first step in removing some of the usability issues hindering wide-spread adoptance of RSS and OPML. Microsoft has also released these extension under a Creative Commons license, which indicates a move towards openness - which leads to the next announcement…

Next, Microsoft announced that they will be Standardizing the Microsoft Office Open XML formats by bringing the Microsoft Office Open XML formats to a standards body with the intention of eventually making the formats an ISO standard! This should open the door to true interoperability between competitors like Open Office and Corel Office (I think the later is still around). This is a huge announcement. I really don’t need all of the great features that Office has to offer. My needs of these tools are very limited, but I’m forced to use them as I need to exchange and collaborate on documents with my coworkers and clients. So maybe this announcement will mean that in the near future I won’t have to pay a bundle for software that I use in a limited manner, but can opt for the free and able Open Office productivity suite.

Finally, the Redmond company announced Windows Live Custom Domains, which is the launch of Microsoft’s email hosting package. On the outside it looks pretty attractive providing the following features:

• Create up to 20 e-mail accounts within your domain
• Get a 250 MB inbox for each account
• Check your e-mail from any Web-enabled PC
• Junk e-mail filter protection using Microsoft SmartScreen technology
• Virus scanning and cleaning of e-mail

For a cost of FREE it looks like a pretty good package, but you should be aware that it is advertising supported. When I first read this, I expected that the ads would show up when you read your emails - which is acceptable given the fact that they are offering this great package for free. But (yes with Microsoft there often is a but), it appears that early users of this service are reporting that the ads are also appended to all the emails you send! Pretty lame as far as I’m concerned. The other small problem (for me at least) is that this package is only available if you live in the 50 US states and Puerto Rico. I’m from Canada (as are 32 million other people) so I guess I won’t be sending email with Microsoft targeted ads.

Yahoo! recently published a whitepaper titled RSS—Crossing into the Mainstream (pdf) that summarizes a Ipsos-Insight poll that they recently commissioned. Some of the interesting findings include that awareness of RSS is quite low among Internet users with 12% of users being aware of RSS, and only 4% have knowingly used RSS. Also very interesting was the finding that 27% of Internet users consume RSS syndicated content on personalized start pages (e.g., My Yahoo!, My MSN) without knowing that RSS is the enabling technology. If you’re developing any product that uses or creates RSS, this paper is certainly worth a read.

Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion, offers Ten RSS Hacks like Find New Desktop Wallpaper with Flickr and Got a Car? Subscribe to its RSS Feed. There are 8 others that you RSS power users should check out as well!