Seth Godin, marketing genius extraordinaire, says that podcasting is a good name, in contrast to Mark Ramsey's nay. Podcasting, of course, uses RSS. Seth takes exception with the name RSS, which he says is "brave but foolish". In fact, he calls it Really Stupid Slogan.

I think I have to agree with Seth. Sort of. Podcasting is a great name. It's catchy and it rhymes with broadcasting. Tech-savvy people will probably get it. Most, anyway. But the general public may not. Even some tech-savvy people first thought that it meant you had to use an Apple iPod. However, what exactly did people think of the term "VCR"?

Which leads us to another acronym that is gaining ubiquity: RSS. You have to remember that RSS was originally intended for use by tech-savvy people. But it really means nothing to anyone else. I've discussed this before: I think that RSS/ content syndication needs a catchier name, if it is to achieve widespread use by most Internet users. There might be grief from early adopters, who sometimes feel betrayed if a technology changes in name, but it's a necessity.

After reading Seth's post, I threw around some ideas, not coming up with much: syndication, web syndication, e-syndication. My old fave, which Microsoft supposedly coined and is pushing, is web feeds. I liked it at first (despite that I'm loathe to agree with Microsoft about anything). But now I'm thinking that it's still too obscure. Someone could easily think it has something to do with a certain superhero that crawls around in spider-webbing.

So I thought about how technology is typically named. Traditionally, the person(s) naming a technology would turn to Greek or sometimes Latin to find word roots matching functional meaning. Telephone is one example, television another. (Mark Ramsey points out that tele in Greek means "far off".)

But this is a different time, and I'm not sure this technique would work anymore. More to the point, I don't know much Greek or Latin. If the act of "content syndication" is going to be renamed, it would have to be something short, sweet, and more less obscure than either RSS or web feeds.

Content syndication is far too wordy and mundane a term. It's functionally accurate, but a mouthful. E-syndication could work, but I'm partial to the term webscription. Like podcasting, it's evocative of something familiar. Most people hear web, and they'll probably think Internet. The "scription" part is at least familar if not immediately obvious. And because it is preceded by the "b" in "web", it makes me think of subscription. A web subscription.

A technology name has to carry meaning in terms of function. However, if it's intended for mass consumption, it cannot be too geeky. It has to be easy to remember and evoke something about its function, etc. No doubt, television was not immediately obvious when it first came out. But when people learned what it was, the term was not an issue. It's even shortened to TV in North America and "telly" in the UK.

I know I've flip-flopped from web feeds, but my vote is for webscription. The only problem is, Baen Books uses the term WebScription to refer to their electronic books subscription web service.

(c) Copyright Raj Kumar Dash, http://www.chameleonintegration.com/

Tags: rsscases, rss cases, RSS, web feeds, content syndication, e-syndication, webscriptions