Fixing (RSS/Atom) Newsfeed Subscription

July 27, 2005 | 24 Comments

There has been a whole bunch of talk about how unusable the blogging subscription/syndication model is. The problem is that it’s not an easy thing to explain, and many developers and designers have gone and made it harder by spreading around terms and conventions that don’t really work.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the last few weeks, and I’ve actually been out there, in the real world, doing some “gorilla” research into this stuff. What I’ve found wasn’t really a surprise, but at the same time I think it hammered home how hard some of this stuff is to grasp for some people.

I want to talk about what I found a bit, and then explore some solutions.

Many people don’t know what a blog is, let alone what RSS or Atom are

I’ve been talking to people. You know, in person? And it turns out that blogging isn’t as big as we might think it is. I’ve spoken with many people who I’d assumed were at least somewhat familiar with the term “blog” only to find out they might know more about podcasting than they do blogging.

For example, I had a chat two weeks or so ago with two very highly educated professionals. One, a marketing coordinator, had never heard of blogging. (She was in marketing! Hellooo?!?) The other, a teacher, knew the term, but didn’t know much more than that.

(They both were somewhat familiar with podcasting, I assume via iTunes, which I found interesting.)

In my course of research, a few days over a few weeks talking to lots of people with varying backgrounds, I actually found relatively few people who knew much of anything about blogging.

As well, a few days ago, I read this study on blogging and usability (thanks to Digital Web) which seems to back up most of what I learned.

You can also look at the various blogging services; Technorati, Del.icio.us, Digg, Blo.gs and the like, for proof of this. They are very technology and geek heavy. Blogging just isn’t all that mainstream yet.

And then there are syndication technologies.

When asked about syndication, or feed readers, they new nothing at all. Nothing. I think I found one person (out of about 30) who knew half as much as I did on the subject. That was a tad surprising—these were all smart people who seemed pretty savvy when it comes to the Web, etc.

Subscription and syndication are hard to explain

Have you ever tried to explain how to subscribe to a newsfeed to someone who doesn’t already have a pretty good clue how they work? It’s really, really hard.

I think part of the reason is we tend to use terminology that is less than ideal. We link to our feeds with titles like “XML” and “RSS”. (Never mind the confusion that having multiple flavors (Atom) adds to the mix.) As well, we usually refer to the technology as “syndication” when, as a user sees it, it’s more like “subscription” or “notification.”

The technology isn’t exactly straightforward either. The links themselves usually pull up straight XML. Not something your average reader is equipped to deal with. I know there are ways to style these feeds (XSLT, etc.) and I think that helps, and I imagine with some readers they’ll auto-subscribe, but we’re still in a place that for most people, this is confusing.

Anyway, it’s a new technology and we can all tell it needs some work. We’re early adopters, at least in general, and you can expect some confusion. I’m hoping that as these technologies evolve the subscription process will become transparent to the reader, and think some of the issues we have now will go away.

In the meantime I think we can take a few steps to clean it up a bit.

A few recommendations and a working example

Based on all of this I think a few changes could be recommended to most sites:

When presenting a newsfeed to a reader, use more straight-forward language. It sort of depends on the topic and audience, but plain english could really help.
“Subscribe” seems to make more sense than “Syndicate”.
Don’t call it “XML” or “RSS” or “Atom” when talking to your readers. Again, unless your audience knows the deal.
Have instructions on your site on how to subscribe to a feed. Keep them simple, but detailed. Link to more thorough explanation if you feel it’s appropriate.
Make your instructions as easy to find as possible.
Don’t assume people will “get it.” When explaining, try and think as if your reader has never heard of these things.
The little orange badge looks more like a badge than a button. Just keep that in mind.

Some examples

I’ve tried to put some of this into practice at To-Done and will continue to refine. You can see my subscription page there. As I know how hard this can be to explain, if you want you can copy that to your hearts content, just make sure to change the links.

A few more examples I like:

Chetan’s Monologue. This one is a bit too detailed for my taste, but pretty straight-forward.
Eric Meyer. Not a lot of explanation, but his audience doesn’t need it. He does a good job of displaying his feeds.
Mezzoblue. This is a great explanation. It’s not as easy to find as it might be, but it’s at “/subscribe” and his audience is more technical.

Comments

1. Mikkel said:

Nice article.

I’m building a second-hand clothes webshop for a girl I know, and a blog would be perfect for the site. But no blog without a feed, and I’ve actually been wondering how to explain it to the readers (and the girl running the site).

You’re right on time, Keith :)

Posted on July 27, 2005 08:50 AM | #

2. Jeff Croft said:

Well said, Keith.

One thing, though: In my mind, syndication and subscription are two very different things, both of which are provided by RSS/Atom feeds and feedreaders. Subscription is the ability to receive notification of new content in a particular feed (i.e. at a particular site). Syndication is the ability to make your content available for use in other resources (i.e. on other sites). As “syndication” is a term commonly used in the TV/radio world, think of it this way:

Syndication: What NBC does with old episodes of Friends. They allow them to be broadcast on other networks (such as TBS).

Subscription: What my TiVo does with episodes of Friends. It lets me know when they’re only and captures them for me.

RSS/Atom provides both, but the two are distinctly different functions.

Posted on July 27, 2005 09:19 AM | #

3. Keith said:

Jeff - True. The problem is that the people to whom we are usually speaking want to subscribe. In fact, I’d guess that those who know how to use a feed for syndication probably don’t need much clarification.

I know when I place my feeds on my site it’s for subscription purposes. I’d guess that’s the same for most publishers. But you make a good point, thanks for explaining the difference.

Posted on July 27, 2005 09:27 AM | #

4. Britt said:

One problem I have about using the word subscribe is that most people think of subscribing in terms of giving their email address for an email newsletter. Of the examples listed, your subscription page does the best job of trying to explain that it’s like email, but different.

One thing I’ve noticed is that many people I talk to about this topic aren’t very interested in downloading and installing a newsreader, but they do light up a bit when I show them Bloglines. For some, it reminds them of the old portals. And now we have Google’s personalized homepage.

Posted on July 27, 2005 09:58 AM | #

5. Joshua Porter said:

Good overview, Keith.

Google homepage now allows for subscription to RSS feeds and never mentions the words subscribe, syndicate, or feed. I found that very interesting, considering the reasons you allude to above.

Also, this aligns very well with Dave Sifry’s comment that RSS will succeed by disappearing.

Posted on July 27, 2005 11:08 AM | #

6. Jeff Croft said:

I’ve used the TiVo example to explain using RSS feeds with a newsreader to people before:

“It’s like getting a ‘season pass’ to your favorite website.”

Of course, this only makes sense to people who know what TiVo and TiVo’s Season Pass are. :)

Posted on July 27, 2005 11:23 AM | #

7. Tony said:

I recently went to an interview for a webmaster/communications coordinator job for a journalism-related non-profit in DC. One of the interview questions was “what are some of the things you would do to improve the web site?”

My first thought, and therefore my reply, was to create RSS feeds for the site’s content. You should’ve seen the blank looks I got back from the two interviewers.

“Is that like email?” was the follow-up question. I wish I had been able to come up with a really concise and non-technical response at the time. I think i just babbled something about it being a subscription, and that people had stand-alone programs that would periodically check for updated feeds.

I guess I was a little thrown off by the fact that these individuals were interviewing for a web master without knowing much about the technical side of things at all.

Posted on July 27, 2005 12:12 PM | #

8. Paul said:

I totally agree. These things need to be made simpler, much simpler. All of us geeks are really into every update, every new technology, we spend hours every day on the web scouring for info…but the general public has no idea and, to tell the truth, has no interest in finding out about any of this. They just want their computer to work, period. They want email, simple browsing, the basics.

Also, RSS feeds place an emphasis on text, and most people (once again, the general public) do not want to read text on the computer. I think that the vast majority of people use the web as entertainment…

Yes, the promise of the web has been fulfilled. It’s entirely and overwhelmingly empowering. But it’s up to the individual to show an interest and harness that power.

Posted on July 27, 2005 03:18 PM | #

9. Tom Oakes said:

I think it helps to start by explaining the purpose of using a feed aggregator in the first place - it makes the subscription concept easier for the uninitiated to grasp.

I embarked upon explaining the whole blog/syndication thing to my mother when she visited a few weeks ago, and I think I did a pretty decent job. If she gets it, there’s hope for others…

Once the concept’s understood, it’s a matter of getting someone to copy a URL, switch to their reader, and paste. This is unfortunately harder than it sounds for most non-techie folks. I agree with Sifry - that it has to be transparent to be widely adopted.

I see the ultimate issue as the gap between the XML file and the reader, and think the best long-term solution is to build aggregator capability into the browser. Firefox’s little “Subscribe to RSS…” deal is a start, but it doesn’t aggregate, it just bookmarks.

Posted on July 27, 2005 04:41 PM | #

10. Adam Fellowes said:

I hear your pain, RSS, XML, syndication, subscription, notification these are such difficult concepts to explain.

I think one on the main reason it’s so hard to deviate from the norm is that so few examples of good (better) practice / execution exist. The only main stream example I know of is the BBC, they have covered off most of the usability issues.

Posted on July 28, 2005 07:27 AM | #

11. Dan said:

I appreciate the intent here, but agree with some of the other comments regarding confusion and misunderstanding on the part of novices.

For example, I work on a site that offers subscriptions to a “real” monthly newsletter as well as a weekly email newsletter. In both cases, users provide their email or physical address via a form and are then signed up.

To add an “RSS Subscription” to the mix would confuse users of this site. For RSS, they don’t provide their information anywhere and they don’t automatically receive anything. To market this as “receiving automatic notices when a site is updated” also fails to live up to expectations; there’s nothing automatic about it: you have to download and install software or sign up for an online service and then regularly run that software or visit that service.

For a user that’s initially finding out about RSS from a desire to keep up with one or two sites, it’s tough to concisely explain the benefits. RSS really only seems great when you’re trying to stay current with content from multiple sites.

Posted on July 28, 2005 08:03 AM | #

12. J. J. said:

Check out http://www.kbcafe.com/rss/?guid=20050601031621 for the top 10 ways to make subscribing easier. Anyone know much about USM?

By the way, your To-Done subscription link needs to be updated in this post. I also don’t see any way to “add a comment to” that page, as you have instructed at the bottom of the To-Done Subscribe page.

Posted on July 28, 2005 08:23 AM | #

13. Cameron Moll said:

I’ve always enjoyed Richard Rutter’s simple explanation: http://clagnut.com/writings/syndication/ (BTW Keith, your link to To-Done’s subscribe page in the examples section is off?)

Posted on July 28, 2005 09:08 AM | #

14. Christian Watson said:

The major news sites often have good descriptions of how to use RSS as their readership is across the board in terms of technical ability.

For example, the BBC site has a really nice RSS help page: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/rss/default.stm.

Posted on July 28, 2005 04:08 PM | #

15. michael d. pollock said:

hey keith: great piece. love your blog too. to follow up on your suggestions, i created a brief screencast on my blog to help folks better understand rss and subscribe to blogs. you’re sort of the star of the show. well … your blog is anyway.

thanks for the energy - mp

Posted on July 28, 2005 08:12 PM | #

16. Matt Round said:

I switched to a ‘Subscribe’ page fairly recently and removed all the feed links from elsewhere in my weblog. We need to stop cluttering sites with XML/RSS/Atom buttons and at least try to explain the technologies.

Posted on July 29, 2005 04:50 AM | #

17. Jim Renaud said:

I think a huge point is that no one really cares. By no one, I mean me. I am a designer and geek, but I never got into the whole RSS subscription hoopla because I hate em and find them completely unnecessary. I have three folders in Safari labelled Daily, Weekly and Monthly and then I view them all in tabs in those periods of time. I could care less if someone read Dooce 4 hours before me because of a subscription.

The key is, I think most users want to go to you beautiful sites. I don’t want to read content in some newsreader, blah. What am I supposed to subsrcibe to Snowsuit or Heather Champ’s site? What’s the point?

Plus I like going to the site and looking at people’s Flickr feeds, their sidebar links and their entries. The RSS feeders, iccck.

I think what would be cool and a free idea to you geeks out there at Mozilla or Apple, would be to have “Smart Bookmark Folders” like they do in Apple Mail or iTunes and have those smart bookmark folders contain all the sites that have been updated then you will only have to open the sites in tabs that have been updated. But please spare me from the all-text page. I am not interested in that at all!!!

Posted on July 29, 2005 06:38 AM | #

18. Keith said:

Jim – I think I know how you feel. But I also think you’re wrong. I’ve got a pretty good idea, based on my own behavior and watching many, many people use Web sites that people want to go to beautiful sites for awhile and then they tend to ignore the beauty or resent it if it’s in the way of their reading or using the content.

I’m appriceate an easy-on-the-eyes design, but in general, when it comes to blogs especially, I want to read. I still enjoy reading many sites via my browser, but I’ve found that those that are distracting in any way at all – beauty can distract – I prefer to read in my newsreader.

I used to think just the way you do, but I read so much now that I’ve changed my tune. I’d agree that many designers read the way you do, but as much as I’d love it to be true, most readers don’t behave the way designers do.

I’m not saying do away with design, not at all, but it’s good to have a choice and not providing (and making sure people can use and understand) feeds will cost you readers.

Posted on July 29, 2005 10:26 AM | #

19. Mike D. said:

Jim: Yeah, I totally agree with Keith on this one. The days of “daily, weekly, and monthly” folders are clearly numbered. That only works until you hit the critical point where random checks become cumbersome and woefully inefficient. The fact that people want to view beautiful sites (while true) has nothing to do with the question at hand here. The question is: how to we easily get people in the habit of “push” when most people are still used to “pull”?

Push has always been a more efficient and useful concept than pull, but the problem with it in the past has been relevance. Pointcast was a push service, but it just pushed too much damn stuff down to you that it not only overloaded networks, but it overloaded your brain too. RSS has now given us the ability to choose what is pushed to us with stunning granularity. The Wolf’s implementation is, not surprisingly, the best in existence at this point in time. Want to get notified whenever he writes something new except when it relates to music, SilverPoint, or “The Girl”? No problem… tailor your feed to suit.

This sort of thing is not about sacrificing the beauty of your site and it’s not about reading in aggregators vs. browsers. It’s simply about efficient delivery of new and relevant information.

Posted on July 30, 2005 10:22 AM | #

20. Jim Renaud said:

I still disagree. Most users only go to 5 site-types tops. Google/Yahoo for a search, eBay for some browsing, Amazon-types when they want to buy and maybe CNN-news types when an event happens. So none of these can be truly syndicated (besides eBay) because most users still “pull.”

Mike, why do we want to “push”? Is that better? I disagree. I tried Sherlock when it came out because that was supposed to help me, then I stopped using it. Then I got my sites in a new reader and then I relaized I don’t really like reading online. I like to skim. And if email in our office is any indication most users like to skim to, cuz I get the most idiotic responses ever.

Podcasting and blogging will never be much bigger than it currently is no matter how much more pulling or pushing goes on. Most people don’t care about what common peple have to say. especially in this celebrity driven 1980’s-esque culture we have going on. MTV Cribs anyone? My backward ass company is launching a damn blog with RSS feeds, sound the death-nail.

Personally, I’m banning all news readers. Cuz I want to do the pushing and not anyone else. Wow, I sound like a whiner and an internet grandpa.

I’ve been in this internet racket too god damn long. I think I need a vacation…

Posted on July 31, 2005 03:49 PM | #

21. Mike D. said:

Jim: I must be an idiot because I didn’t understand a word of that.

Posted on August 1, 2005 01:40 AM | #

22. Jim Renaud said:

Mike you are not an idiot. I am.

I am just an old fogey who really likes websites and hates newsreaders and my hunch is that the larger group of people will not take to newsreaders either.

My reason is that there are very few websites that most people go to consistenly that are text driven. My examples were search engines, shopping and news sites like CNN/NY Times on an inconsistent basis.

You can’t syndicate a search engine. Syndicated shopping doesn’t seem all to popular unless you were a collector of something specific and then could subscribe to a certain item popping up on eBay or Amazon. Possibly a syndication of sale items. And news sites could definitely syndicate and offer a subscription type service, but my hunch is that people like the internet so they don’t have to be pushed content. They like going to the news sites on their terms. So maybe syndications on specific stories might work… For instance you can subscribe to your favorite baseball team’s progress, but I just don’t think there are that many more people who want to do this.

The reason I like Apple’s approach to RSS is that it has to be a part of the browser or people will forget about it and stop using it. So I could concede that if fairly targeted and integrated very well into a browser a user may choose syndication based on a compiling type basis. Like setting up a syndication pulling from various sources all the information about X.

Essentially Keith and you are right then. Because you are using them to complile syndications from various sources about blogging/design/etc.

I think it’s a great day for writers, but a bit disappointing to the designer. It just seems that things are slipping away for the designers. People aren’t seeing record covers anymore by downloading music and people are mining sites for content to be pulled into a boring newsreaders.

Posted on August 1, 2005 09:14 AM | #

23. mark said:

I agree wholeheartedly! I just posted noting that I’d been doing the same - trying to explain feeds to people who are new to them. It seems like there’s been far too little effort put into blogs’ usability as websites.
I’m collecting good examples of introductions and explanations of feeds and subscriptions. Please comment on the Teaching people to subscribe” post or send me an email. Thanks!

Posted on August 21, 2005 09:03 AM | #

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Posted on April 24, 2006 11:39 AM | #

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