Online Journalism News

RSS rename contest heats up

Journalist and blogger Amy Gahran has launched a contest to find a more memorable name for RSS, the newsfeed tool.

RSS, or Rich Site Summary, is the term for a type of newsfeed. Rather than receiving headlines by subscribing to email newsletters, web users can install a programme such as FeedDemon that picks up headlines automatically. Users can sign up to receive updates from any site with an RSS feed.

"My hope is that a new vernacular name for RSS would make this intriguing and versatile option more comprehensible and appealing to a mass, non-technical audience," Ms Gahran told dotJournalism.

"Without that mass audience, RSS might be doomed to the technical backwater - the domain of geeks and bloggers - and I think that would be a shame."

Many news publishers believe that RSS will play an important role in the future of news delivery because it avoids the problems of junk email and can organise information from a large number of sites. Many news sites - including the Guardian, BBC and dotJournalism - already provide RSS feeds.

"Most people only want to know the bare minimum about a technology to enable them to do what they want to do, and they hate being burdened with technical information," said Ms Gahran.

"The name is a significant barrier to that vast group of people. I've seen their eyes glaze over as soon as they hear yet another internet acronym."

The contest, which runs until 31 December, has already had more than 200 entries.

"It seemed that a contest was a good way to solicit a broad range of ideas - and it has indeed accomplished that goal," she said.

"It's also stirred up a surprising amount of controversy."

Critics of the contest have said that yet another name for RSS will create more confusion because the existing term has already caught on and some within the software development community have been particularly critical.

"These are the people who helped develop the RSS technical standard and many of these people are very attached to the RSS acronym," she said.

"Acronyms are appropriate for certain audiences like technical specialists, who tend to be very comfortable with acronyms in general."

Ms Gahran has recently been labelled an 'RSS evangelist' and is keen to encourage more experimentation with the tool. She says the possibilities go far beyond headline delivery.

"There are possibilities for specialisation and customisation, with separate feeds for things like statistics, regulatory updates, event calendars, incident reports and so on.

"It's just so easy to set up a feed and automate it, there's really no excuse for a news venue not to offer one or more feeds."

See also:
http://blog.contentious.com/contest.html
http://blog.contentious.com/archives/000038.html
http://www.journalism.co.uk/news/story579.shtml

RSS programme for PCs:
http://www.bradsoft.com/feeddemon/index.asp

RSS programme for Macs:
http://ranchero.com/netnewswire

dotJournalism RSS feed:
http://www.journalism.co.uk/news/dotjheads.xml

Tags (click tag to find related articles; click icon for feed):
bbc | the guardian | dotjournalism | web users | confusion | internet acronym | software development community | amy gahran |

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