This is great news – Microsoft “just announced”:http://blogs.msdn.com/rssteam/archive/2005/12/14/503778.aspx that they’ll be using the Firefox feed icon as _their_ official feed icon in upcoming releases. This is a big boost to consistency around a crucial technology that is still mired in overly technical language.
I strongly recommend that publishers start using this icon to identify feed availability on their sites. We’ll be doing this with the next iteration of One Degree (due shortly).
Now we just need to get everyone to agree to call them all *feeds* and forget about identifying particular file formats (RSS, Atom, XML, RDF, etc.) – another consumer unfriendly hold over from the early days. (And no Google, “web clips” isn’t going to stick – they’re feeds.)
(via “Memeorandum”:http://tech.memeorandum.com/051214/p54#a051214p54 and “Neville Hobson”:http://www.nevon.net/nevon/2005/12/a_standard_symb.html)