Tim Bray exposes the real problem with feeds: that they aren’t one-click. However, while I agree that this is the primary problem, I don’t agree that naming is unimportant. Naming is how people learn. There is a difference between syndicate and subscribe, no matter how small. We saw this over on Brain Sparks. A seasoned RSS guy wrote in to say that he didn’t know what subscribe meant, and lost his way. He was looking for an orange button…

Nevertheless, Tim nails the main issue…it’s about making things as easy as possible for people.

Richard MacManus, in his weekly recap of Web 2.0 news, reports that the word “feed” is becoming the preferred term to refer to your RSS/Atom file. This is close on the heels of the recent BayCHI meeting that left me with the sense that there is a slow consensus coming around and is similar to the syndicate/subscribe discussion we had a while back.

Update: similar discussion going on here: (via Scoble): Jim Moore has an in-depth post about RSS as brand. He compares “RSS” to “Kleenex”….odd at first but after a while it becomes the de-facto standard.

Some of you may find this stuff uninteresting and boring. I think it is important for several reasons. First, it is always good to make sure that everyone is on the same page, that when one person says “feed” the other person knows exactly what they are talking about. Second, we all learn this way, by pushing and pulling the language of something brand new. Third, when we take a higher level view of all this we can see better the areas for improvement, where we need extra work.

For those trying to get their head around this whole Web 2.0 thing, check out the podcast of the August BayCHI meeting titled Are you ready for Web 2.0?. The speakers at this talk are great: clear, passionate, and to the point.

I was struck by how the language around Web 2.0 is starting to solidify. In particular, Stewart Butterfield talked about “public APIs” and the “architecture of participation”. David Sifry talked about how people share their ideas and mark up others with RSS and tags. Paul Rademacher talked about “service-based apps”, making a distinction between the “data side” and the “interface side”. Of course, if you read bokardo you know that the data side (if public) is actually an interface too: an application programming interface. See Two Kinds of Interfaces in Web 2.0. And Thomas Vander Wal talks about “Come to Me” web, an interesting notion that is part of his “Personal Infocloud”. In addition, the moderator, Rashmi Sinha, has a good writeup on the move toward Web 2.0.

This podcast was really fun to listen to. Each speaker talked for ~10 minutes, which is a good length of time for a quick introduction to one main idea. The dicussion afterward was interesting, too, but a little scattered. Whether you like the term or not, this podcast will get you thinking more about Web 2.0!

From David Weinberger comes a glimpse into the History of alphabetization. An interesting tidbit on the history of alphabetization, with a sliver of interface design and information architecture thrown in.

Apparently, back when papyrus scrolls were the writable interface, people left blanks in order to add items later. This, of course, is a constraint of the medium.

I bet adding future content gave stone cutters nightmares. Information architects have it easy!

Brain Sparks is a blog that I’ve set up for UIE, where I work. It’s chock-full of little insights into the usability research and writing that we do. It’s also a place for conversation: we’ve turned on comments and appreciate any and all of them.

Jared Spool, Christine Perfetti, and I are the principal bloggers. We’ll be working hard to keep the site relevant and useful. So, if you’re looking for a conversation about how to create better designed, usable web sites, check out Brain Sparks.

Meeting Tim Berners-Lee would be like meeting my equivalent of the Pope. Interviews are about as close as I can expect to get to this, so I highly recommend this BBC interview: Berners-Lee on the read/write web

Did you know that the first web browser had write capabilities?

Moving the discussion along is Mark Sigal over at O’Reillynet: Envisioning RSS as a Web 2.0 platform.

Bobby Wolff, part of the IBM blogging group, suggests that Web 2.0 is like the MVC architecture. Cool idea.

“create tools for the people with the ideas and then get out of their way. That’s what OPML is about.”

Ben Hammersly, author of the O’Reilly title: Developing Feeds with RSS & Atom, has written a necessary and useful article about styling RSS feeds with CSS. It is necessary because many folks, when encountering a raw XML feed for the first time in a browser, have no idea that they’re supposed to simply copy the URL and paste it into their feed reader of choice. It is useful because Hammersly describes the process clearly.