“Follow this Blog” to replace RSS Links
When I read about Google’s move to mainstream RSS on ReadWriteWeb, I was shocked at how obvious this was. However, there’s still one giant hurdle new users will face with RSS regardless of the terminology we use in links: The landing page.
Helping people understand RSS has been a pain point of the amazingly useful technology since it first popped up on blogs several years ago. Whether it was “Subscribe to RSS” or consistent icons, everything else fell short. “Follow this *(blog, site, topic, whatever)” gets to the point immediately and should help users know what to expect when clicking on the link.
But when a user lands on a traditional RSS page (listing of the last 10 or so links) with various calls to action to subscribe via various RSS readers, we still haven’t got there. Google has an advantage. They own one of the largest blog platforms and arguably the best RSS reader. They can seamlessly tie the two together. Publishers that don’t use Blogger don’t have that luxury.
That’s why I’d encourage Google Reader (and other RSS readers) to make it simple for publishers to mimic the functionality they’re proposing for Blogger. Imagine if all the “Digg This” links in the world simply took a user to the Digg homepage and required them to figure out how to add the story they were just on. RSS is even more complicated after the “Follow this” click simply because of the number of confusing options presented to the user.
I envision the process looking something like this:
- User clicks on “Follow this…” link
- User is presented with 2 options
- “Follow this…” using [[Publisher's preferred reader]]
- “Advanced users” follow using your existing reader
- If option 1: user creates a simple account and the feed they clicked is added to their reading list
Feel free to pick this idea apart in the comments below.
