Lingo is so important.

I was at a lecture once given by a top Australian political PR/Lobbyist. He recounted running the battle over some environmental policy that the National Farmers Federation (NFF) was opposing.

Fascinating stuff.

One of the central components was 'owning' a handful key phrases. They wanted 'sustainable' (as in economically sustainable communities).'Custodianship' (the farmers as opposed to collective) to be associated with them. He showed the progression of the use of these in the media over the campaign period.

There was a 180 degree turn. All those words completely changed sides & completely changed meanings. The public attitudes (eg for/against sustainability) didn't.

I wonder what RSS adoption would have been if the it had a better lingo to begin with.

Firefox displays "subscribe to this page" when you hover over the orange feed icon on the right of the address bar. The terminology is already established.

Just like how it says "www" or "http", but people associate both of those with "web page".

I agree that "RSS" is not an intuitive name, but the article is making this into a bigger issue than it is. After all they are only changing the link. :)

I wholeheartedly disagree - getting the terms right is SO important. For instance, I was about 2 yrs late to blogging because the word "blog" just confused me, but I jumped right into podcasts because I knew exactly what it was just from hearing the word.

Getting terms right is one thing, but many sites already have such terminology. i.e.: Follow this post _link_

Blogging is not something to be late to, 99% of the blogs are not worth reading, including mine.

We already have feeds, might not be the best but at least it's more accurate than "RSS".

My impression when trying to explain Twitter to non-geeks was that "follow" is not really that great a choice of word. It sounds rather weird actually, like a cult. That's in Germany, though, might be because I am not a native speaker.

"Follow" seems natural to me now, but I remember thinking it sounded a bit stalkerish when I first saw it. And I'm not sure it's any more comprehensible than "subscribe" for casual users.

RSS and site feeds are the DVR of the internet.

Just thought I'd get that one in there. If you need to market it to someone, call it that.

Come to think of it, that is a smoking hot idea. There really is no TiVo of the internet feed reader.

You don't star your subscriptions. Your feed reader doesn't crawl out on the internet looking for more content like what you're already "recording". You can't set up a wish list... and there's no real clearinghouse of feeds (listings) or the semantic links between them (read Coding Horror? you may also like Joel on Software). I know the analogy is not perfect, but it sure seems like fertile ground...

Why do people who are arguably familiar with these things insist on using "RSS"? RSS is but one format, atom is growing rapidly and it is I believe already used by most Google services including Blogger. "Feeds" is the correct term and while not perfect surely better than some unpronounceable acronym.

For the same reason that people still write with a Biro or Hoover the carpet.

Basically, they want to turn Blogger into a Twitter-like social network that isn't limited to 140 characters.

Tumblr already uses this lingo, too, and I think it should make more sense to people. I thought that the "RSS is like email" metaphor would work, but I think this is going to help adoption quite a bit.

Because "subscribe" is a term not understood by anyone to mean receiving something regularly, of course.