Feedmarks - A Way Of Making Web Feed Subscription Simple and Transparent

Tom Peters is a marketing Genius, with a capital G. Not only does his website have an "XML" webfeed link for every category of post, he also has an orange XML button linked to what he calls his Free Stuff RSS feed. I mean, how much better could a free web feed be than to one that distributes free stuff as well :?)

This free stuff includes 2 e-books, Tom Rants! Summer04 (82 pgs) and Project05 (240 pgs), both containing marketing and entrepreneurship advice and general rants from his weblog. But the free stuff isn't the only thing that catches my eye. Partway down the main page at right is a box labelled TP!Wire Service showing "featured headlines".

A glance at the source code behind this web page reveals that the source of the headlines is in fact a form of web feed (RDF actually - presumably RSS 0.92). A piece of javascript pulls in the feed, massages it, then displays it as HTML links.

The visual effect on the site makes this "headlines" box stand out. Now this is a fine example of how to promote your web feed. Except, well, he doesn't, really. The source of articles in this very visible box are from another of Tom's websites. Which is fine. But the missed opportunity is the lack of a "subscribe to these headlines" type of link in the box. You could do the same thing by using a service like Feedburner's BuzzBoost or Feed2js. Just remember to also include a "subscribe" link. (I know; I'm guilty of not doing it on all of my sites either - it's a work in progress.)

Over in the lefthand column of the web page, however, is a list of categories, each with their own HTML link and XML (feed) link. Except there's over 20 "XML" links staring me in the face, plus an orange "XML" button below the list offering "Get the Blog RSS feed".

To someone like myself who knows what RSS, I love this list. I can pick and choose which categories of articles I want to subscribe to. If I don't know what it is, I could click on the "What is RSS" link he has displayed in the same area. This link leads to a rather brief description of RSS and its benefits. Possibly too brief.

I'm not picking on Tom Peters or his website because I actually like it very much. I'm simply using it as an example of how even a finely thought out site still may not garner 100% subscription rates - which I think is possible in the future if subscribing to feeds becomes as easy as changing channels on the TV or radio - or bookmarking feed URLs the way we bookmark web page URLs.

Dave Winer, the man who created the RSS format, starting with the early Scripting News format, agrees that RSS isn't quite yet easy to use (links below, found via Debbie Weil). Here are the two points Dave makes:

It must be easy to find relevant feeds.
Subscription has to be centralized.

I agree but I think it goes further than that. Tom's site does a nice job of fulfilling both of Dave's edicts, from a human point of view. And yet, anyone who does not know what RSS is, and does not even bother to click on the explanation link will become a lost opportunity for the time being. My feeling is that if web feeds are to enjoy broad penetration, browser technologies must assist. There must be a symbiosis between HTML readers (i.e., browsers) and RSS readers (browsers and standalone readers).

Consider the following future scenario. You fire up your brand spanking new browser, which supports a new version of XHTML. (As I understand it, HTML 4.0 will be the final version, and development will move permanently to XHTML.) You come across a new (to you) website. You see a bunch of "XML" buttons or similar icons. Click on the ones that interest you, and automatically they are "bookmarked" into a feed list in your browser that you can arrange into folders - just like regular bookmarks. Or, when there are too many categories and you only want to subscribe to 50-95%, click on a single "subtractive" link first, then "subtract" categories to create a custom feed. Or not.

So what's different about this scenario than the way we currently present our web feed URLs, other than the obvious? Firstly, the feed URLs would be tagged with new pair of tags, <feed url=""></feed>, that are a variation of the <a href=""></a> tags currently used to mark hyperlinks on web pages. Secondly, the bookmarked feed would be added to a list native to the browser being used.

Of course, to support such a scenario, several things have to happen, pretty much in this order:

Someone without clout and time has to propose the new tag to the W3C as an addition to the XHTML standard. Having this tag in web pages means it's easy for web browsers to find a feed URL.
Once this tag is accepted, browser companies have to to not only accept and support the tag to be W3C-compliant, but they have to build in a means to either transport a standardized feed URL list to other feed readers. That or offer feed reader software developers a way for them to hook into browsers so as to automatically pickup a feed URL anytime it is bookmarked. Dave Winer created OPML - Outline Processor Markup Language - which is another XML-based technology that allows you to build outline any type of list. OPML is in fact presented by Dave and company as a means of building feed URL lists.
Someone has to propose new, simple, easy-to-remember terms for these lists and for the building of them. I'd like to propose feedmarks and feedmarking, respectively. However, the term feedmark is already being used in both RSS-related and non-technology related capacities, including Feedmarker.com's Feedmarker extension for the Firefox browser. For the sake of discussion, I'll stick to these terms for now, hoping that someone will come up with something suitable and obvious.
Feed reader companies have to update their software to support these feedmarks. This can be done manually by importing a feedmark list (feedlist), or for those browsers that support it, via a software hook for automatic feedmark updating.
Tech evangelists have to expound at length and redundantly for several years about feedmarking, just they way they did 10 years ago about the web and HTML. This means both TV, print, radio, and Internet coverage.

An additional step which I support is a merger of RSS and Atom for the future, to produce a web feed format that combines the best features of both, and which has a W3C standard. But the process I've described above does not require it.

Any comments on the process described above are most welcome. These things have to be discussed openly if we are to achieve wide penetration of use for web feeds.

Links/ Sources: Tom Peters; Dave Winer - How RSS can bust through, Really Simple Syndication, OPML; Debbie Weil - Blog Write For CEOs - Why RSS has not supplanted email...; World Wide Web Consortium; Feedburner; Feedmarker extension for Firefox browser; Feed2js.

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