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?

Pascal Opitz from the Content with Style blog has a fantastic tutorial on creating : Database-driven tree structures with XML and XSLT. The technique uses the preordered tree traversal method on the database, then uses PHP to create the XML that is then styled with XSLT.

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.

I absolutly love the JavaScript Console in Firefox and with the release of Firefox 1.5, it got even better. Now the standard JS console displays not only great JavaScript error messages, but it now show you CSS errors! The only problem is that with so much information appearing in the console, it can be difficult to find the errors you are looking for. Enter Console². It is a Firefox extension that adds some great filtering options for the console like showing only JavaScript, CSS or XML errors and filtering the source of errors like on the page you are viewing (content) or errors in the Firefox UI (chrome).

I’ve been working alot with XSLT for the past month and I thought I would share this XSLT Roundup that was a great starting point for my education. Thanks ParticleTree!

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!

Microsoft Team RSS Blog has stirred up quite the controversy over The orange RSS icon. They are looking to create an icon for the upcoming release of IE 7.0 and are asking for input on the five icons they have shortlisted. There has been much discussion on the icon in the comments below the post, but for me, I don’t really care what the icon looks like, but rather what it does when I click on it.

Right now, RSS has a huge usability problem. For example, I needed to write a bookmarklet to subscribe to an RSS feed using Google Reader. If I want to use Bloglines or MSN Start I need to use other bookmarklets. To me, this is the bigger issue that needs to be sorted out. Extensions and Bookmarklets are not the answer IMHO. My dad or brother who I consider to be average computer users don’t know how to install or use bookmarklets or extensions – so I consider these solutions to have their own usablility problems.

I hope the browser makers can get together and collectively agree on how to deal with this usability issue, beyond supporting their own proprietary solutions (ie. integrated RSS readers in their own browsers like Safari and Firefox). I’ll start holding my breath now!

Here is how the traditional media are responding to news that IE7 and Longhorn will have extensive support for RSS technology:

• BBC NEWS – Microsoft makes web feeds easier
• e-Week – RSS: It’s Not Just for Bloggers Anymore
• Business Week: Microsoft Crashes the RSS Party