Thursday, August 04, 2005 12:47 PM
I don't wish to delve too deeply into the technical issues surrounding RSS feeds, but I think it is worth noting that the development teams in Redmond are working overtime to make Windows, and applications running on Windows, "RSS-friendly." Given the dominant market share that Microsoft enjoys at the corporate level with its operating system, email client, web browser and word processor, any move it makes to embrace RSS is critically important to the growth of blawgs and legal content syndication.
On this point, Microsoft's Longhorn (aka Windows Vista, which is the next big Microsoft operating system) RSS Development team maintains a weblog in which it previews features and functions we will all be seeing down the road. This group has recently made available a RSS Publisher's Guide. The stated goal of the Guide "is to provide ongoing guidance to publishers on how to create web pages and RSS feeds that work correctly with IE 7 and Windows Vista."
I was particularly interested by a recent posting to this Guide entitled "RSS autodiscovery." The Guide suggests that there will be "a 'Web Feeds' button in IE 7 for Windows XP and in Windows Vista" which will "'light up' when the web page the user is viewing has an associated web feed." Users can even have the "Web Feeds" button play a sound if they so choose [note for techies: the instructions for optimizing your feed links to work with this new IE 7 feature is right in the Guide -- just click the above-mentioned link] [note for non-techies: don't worry about, the services and companies you utilize to produce your blawgs and content will do this for you].
For the blawgosphere, what is exciting about this news is both the commitment Microsoft is making to RSS and sharing information via these feeds, and the continued lowering of the user threshold to subscribe and consume these feeds. The goal should be to simplify the subscription process so that it is so intuitive anyone can figure it out with no instruction. Having a button on your web browser light up and/or play a sound whenever you visit a blawg/website that has an available RSS feed is a big step in the right direction. Good stuff.