As Search Engine Land's Matt McGee points out in his post, Google is the only major web search engine to not offer feeds for basic web search, as they do in blog search and news. We'd previously recommended Live.com for web search feeds, but who really cares about Live.com search results? They're terrible. Google feeds are good news.

Though blogs and news sites are of growing importance, there's still nothing quite like good old Web Search for getting a broad picture of who is linking where and what kind of online mentions are occurring. Google says it cannot confirm when the web search feeds will be available.

We hope that Google web search feeds will include "site:" searches for new mentions of keywords inside particular domains (Live and Yahoo do), and that they will deliver nice clean direct URLs - which Live.com feeds do but Yahoo search feeds do not.

There's still no alerts or feeds available for Google Image Search, probably because the index is so woefully behind the web at large.

The NY Times, BBC, MyYahoo and lots of other media sites already use the pervasive orange buttons and the term 'RSS' - so there's now a definite split (dare I say, fork) in how RSS/feeds are being marketed to the public.

As I mentioned a week ago, personally I think the term 'RSS' and its orange branding has gotten too much traction on the Web already and it's too late to change it now.

In that respect Microsoft and Google shouldn't mess with the brand - it's bigger than both of them. But that doesn't mean they won't succeed in turning the brand into 'Feeds', because as the two biggest Internet companies around - obviously they hold a lot of sway. Dave Winer suggested that Microsoft and Google's name changes "will get routed around", but I wonder whether that's more hope than logic.

I'm conflicted on this. I'd like 'RSS' to continue as the brand name for syndication and feeds. But I also want mainstream adoption - and if Microsoft and Google achieve that by promoting 'feeds', well I guess NY Times, BBC and the others will follow suit in due course and it'll be happily ever after for syndication.

Like it or not, the big companies will drive mainstream adoption. Two of them obviously are reluctant to stick with the status quo and call it RSS. So which way will it go - RSS or Feeds?

UPDATE: This post has attracted some excellent comments. Most people seem to prefer "feeds" as the brand of RSS (and yes I'm using the word 'brand' far too often these days!). MSN's Mike Torres pointed out that HTML pages are known as "web pages", so it's appropriate that RSS feeds be called "web feeds". Peter Cooper said that his own Feed Digest, and Feedburner too, have already gone down this road and refer to them as "feeds". IBM's David Berger commented that "it's an overstatement that RSS and the orange box have "established" themselves as an Internet brand". These and all the other great comments, which mostly support "feeds" over "RSS" as the brand, are compelling arguments.

Hmmm, so "feeds" has the momentum - in this thread at least. I'd still like to hear some more views on this...

But I've been burned too often by mystery-meat teasers that fall far short of their promise, or that are ambiguously worded and turn out to be about something completely different. So nowadays those sites only get my attention when the teaser looks absolutely irresistible -- and that's a bar that's high and rising.

More Noise to Signal

Now before you get all righteous on me, remember this is a test. If the ads aren't contextual enough, or they detract from my writing, or readers threaten me with bodily harm - then I'll take the ads away.

But as I've stated before, essentially RSS feeds are no different from HTML webpages in this Web 2.0 world. RSS and HTML are the primary means of publishing and viewing content on the Web today. Indeed, RSS is arguably more important than HTML nowadays, especially for blogs. So if I put ads on my website (which I do), why not put them in my RSS feed too?

The other thing is that it's an incentive for publishers to use a full-text RSS feed. I've always done that anyway, because of what I outlined above - RSS is (what I call) a "first-class citizen" of content publishing. However a lot of people still publish excerpted feeds and so ads may be the tipping point for full-text feeds.

That's all the theory anyway, let's see how it pans out. I'm very interested to see how contextual the ads are, given this is a topic-focused blog. I'm interested in how readers react to the ads. And of course I'm keen to see if I make more than coffee money from them. Feel free to email or leave comments if you have feedback about the ads.

Now, every feed page on Toluu will show a "Tags" tab. This tab displays all the tags other users have already attached to the feed, as well as a text box to immediately start entering tags. Toluu also suggests tags based on a user's previous behavior on the site. The experience is reminiscent of tagging bookmarks in delicious, where the Ajax interface also makes adding suggested tags as easy as clicking on the keyword.

Besides this, Toluu has gone out of its way to expose these new features in as many places as possible. When browsing through a list of feeds, for example, a little '+' sign appears next to every feed you mouse over, which then exposes an inline tagging interface.

Searching Tags

Because tags are now available on Toluu, the developers have also added the ability to search the complete index of all feeds in Toluu for a specific tag, which is a great way to discover new and interesting feeds to subscribe to.

Overall, we think Toluu did a great job in adding this new feature and making it easily accessible throughout the site. As the tagging feature is still pretty new, only a select few feeds actually have tags attached to them, but as more users start tagging feeds, this will surely become one of the most popular features on Toluu.

Devised by myself and Phil Glockner of Scribkin, we recently talked for a few hours about the overflow of feeds and the repetition of certain topics and sites. With so much more out there to see, there were only a limited amount of ways to get to them without jeopardizing what was already amounting to information overload. This is where RSS Reset Month comes in. Here's the plan and list of rules:

1. Keep feeds that track web site buzz (business-impacting).
2. Allow feeds such as Disqus, Intense Debate or other low-volume feeds that are necessary for timely work decisions.
3. Allow adding as many Google Reader Shared Items feeds as needed.
4. Allow adding of aggregate, smart or keyword-filtered feeds such as RSSmeme FriendFeed Friends or TechMeme.
5. Allow adding smaller site feeds. We set the upper limit for a small site to be 200 at the time of adding. This can be re-visited if the number is too small.
6. Allowance process: If a site feed is so unique that it is not being covered by the processes defined above, an allowance will be made to subscribe to a direct feed to any site. The number of allowances can not exceed 10.

RSS Reset will be in effect for an entire month. Be sure to back up your original OPML file just in case you want to give it a try and decide not to continue at some point. Meanwhile, you can check out what Phil and I are adding on Toluu (Corvida, Phil). All the feeds added will also be conveniently "retweeted" on Twitter.

What's the Point?

Finding new content is hard enough. Finding new subscriptions while keeping up with your current subscriptions can be even tougher. Subscribing to more aggregation sites and smaller quality blogs will allow you to venture into unexplored territories, while giving the "little guys" a chance to be heard.

If you'd like to sign up for Toluu and join in on the fun, leave a comment down below.

Ed Bott also made an excellent point when he said: "The reason some people at Microsoft are exploring alternatives to RSS is because people don't understand the term."

But most interesting to note is the turnaround in the IE7 Team at Microsoft. They originally had an orange RSS feed button in the demo that Robert Scoble filmed just before Gnomedex in June (I specifically mentioned that in my post at the time). But now it seems Microsoft has abandoned the orange RSS button and gone with a stylized orange logo:

And to prove I'm not just drinking the Microsoft kool-aid, Yahoo is also using the term 'feeds' more to describe RSS. See this post referencing the "feeds module" of Yahoo 360 (hat-tip Havi). Needless to say, Google is using 'feeds' as their main term - and ignores the orange buttons altogether.

So sorry Dave and Robert, but it looks like the tide has turned. All 3 bigco's are using 'feeds' and the majority of people that commented on my post are too. The people have spoken - feeds is it.

Hi, I am writing regarding your Subscriber stats functionality in Bloglines. There is one major problem with it. If a blog has multiple RSS feeds, then for each user the Bloglines subscriber count only displays the stats related to the feed subscribed to. That is, Bloglines *does not* aggregate the stats for all of a blog's feeds and display a total count of subscribers. I call this a feed-centered stats service, whereas what most people want is a blog-centered one. More on that here: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/002350.php

It's very common these days to have multiple feeds for a single blog - a typical blog could have feeds for RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0, Atom, and now Feedburner. I've emailed you before about this issue, but I'd like to point you to a recent Feedburner Forums thread in which Feedburner has solved it: http://forums.feedburner.com/viewtopic.php?p=273

As an example, I now have 3 RSS feeds for my blog Read/Write Web - including a Feedburner one which I started (ironically perhaps) to get better stats. So my blog's subscribers are spread over those 3 feeds, which Feedburner now correctly tracks as one (after they fixed the issue with aliases).

A more prominant example is Boing Boing, which has a new Feedburner feed and they're using it as their main feed now. I subscribed to the new Feedburner-powered one and it currently displays in Bloglines as having 36 subscribers. Of course their old feed has well over 12,000 Bloglines subscribers. It may not be a big deal, but in the interests of accuracy wouldn't it be a whole lot better if Bloglines counted *all* of Boing Boing's feeds in your Subcriber count for them that you display?

(nb: Boing Boing illustrates some other issues with blog stats - e.g. there are "lite" versions of their feed available elsewhere and it's possible to create category and filtered feeds for Boing Boing. But one thing at a time, let's solve the issue with aliases first :-)

So, in summary I'd like to once again request that Bloglines takes the number of subscribers on the RSS feed a user subscribes to and combines that with the number of subscribers on alias versions of that same feed. Thus giving a blog-centered subscriber count.

It shouldn't be that hard to do, because you already know which feeds belong to a single blog. e.g. when you click on "Add" and enter a blog's homepage URL into the subscribe field, Bloglines then presents the user with a list of that blog's feeds to select from. So you already have the grouping of feeds for a single blog done.

I realise you have more important things to develop, but it'd be great if you could solve this one issue with your Subscriber stats functionality. Feedburner has solved it now, so perhaps you two innovative Web 2.0 up-and-coming companies (both of which I'm a big fan of) can swap emails about it?

The M.insight application sorts the feeds into four main categories: social media, public relations, marketing and branding, and advertising. It also includes two "in-house" categories which feature feeds from the MWW Group themselves ("MWW/DialogueMedia" and "D.insight").

M.insight functions like an RSS reader, but one that you don't have to set up on your own, meticulously adding feeds one-by-one. Instead, this blog reader is already configured and ready to go. You can, though, add and delete feeds within a category if you so desire.

The app is available on three mobile platforms: the iPhone/iPod Touch, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile. On all three platforms, the app does full feed caching (including images) so you can read your feeds even when offline - a feature more useful on the WiFi-only iPod than the others. On the Blackberry and Windows Mobile platforms, M.insight lets you email articles from within the app or post them to Twitter or Delicious. You can also access other news and info like weather, stocks, sports, flights, etc. 

Although targeted toward the PR/Marketing niche, we think many of you would also enjoy this application, especially the "social media" category which features feeds from top blogs like ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, Chris Brogan, Web Strategist, CenterNetworks and Scobleizer.

To try M.insight for yourself, you can download it from the iTunes App Store by clicking here or for Blackberry and Windows Mobile platforms, click here.

Similar to the real-time news tracker Anothr, IM Feeds allows users to get RSS alerts sent via instant messengers. To get start started, simply add any of the corresponding IM Feed bots to your instant messaging program of choice. Supported IM clients include Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger, AIM, and MSN Messenger. Send the bot a message with "join" and from there you'll be presented with a link to register your account. It's as simple as that. To add feeds, you can send a message to the bot using the 'sub' command or go through your web account with IM Feeds. You can upload an OPML file or enter the full url of each RSS subscription you'd like to subscribe to.

If you're managing your IM Feeds account on the web, your subscriptions will show up in a sidebar with a link to each. On the left, you'll be presented with a list of links to each of the latest updates from your subscriptions. Subscriptions are listed in order by site instead of by date and time, which is a bit unusual for an RSS feed manager. The user interface for the service is nice, simple, and clean with little to no distractions. Even the technologically challenged can set up an account and manage their feeds through the web interface without any help.

Quirks and Suggestions

While the layout is very nice and the service is simple, there were quite a few annoying quirks I ran into when using the service. For one, you need to know the entire feed url for each site. It would be more helpful and convenient to users if they could just type in a site address and have IM Feeds automatically find the feed url to import the feed. Also, the service takes a while to show the latest items for your subscriptions. So be prepared to wait a few minutes before seeing anything in order to prevent feed duplications.

All in all, IM Feeds does the job it was meant to do. When adding a feed, you won't immediately receive any updates. However, once they started rolling in I saw them in my instant messenger before seeing them in Google Reader. There's even a badge that bloggers can add to their sites to get users to subscribe to their RSS updates via Im Feed. I'd say IM Feed does the job quite well.

"RSS is a big topic of discussion around Tangler. Obviously we want to do it, but there's doing it and there's doing it well. Options with an RSS would be interesting and I'd like to see someone do that well.

e.g. Give me everything, or just give we stuff with the word collaboration in it. Or maybe, give me articles with 50+reads and/or 10+ comments."

That got me thinking about how many of you currently subscribe to RSS Remix feeds - i.e. feeds that have been filtered or mashed up with other feeds. 

In my reply to Mick's comment, I said that RSS filtering is still a work in progress. Yahoo Pipes is at the geeky end of the spectrum, with its sophisticated "feed aggregator and manipulator" capabilities. But it shows where we're headed with remix feeds. Market leader in feed management, Feedburner, hasn't done a lot with filtering yet. However we've profiled several RSS Remix products recently on R/WW: FeedBlendr, FeedRinse, FeedDigest and BlastFeed. Others that have been mentioned in our comments are macro.scopia and the interestingly-named Profilactic. There are many others, I'm sure, but the point of this poll is to ask: are you using RSS remix feeds yet?

In practice, however, Feedbuddy isn't much of a social network. The site is dead simple, and probably shouldn't be categorized as a social network at all. It's more of a rudimentary matchmaking service.

The limited choice of contact methods is a bit odd, however. A true social network needs a way for members to contact each other on site, and the off site methods Feedbuddy supports are not only too few, but strange choices as well. The site is from Germany, which might explain why Xing is supported over LinkedIn, or Skype instead of another instant messenger... but why not both business networks, or more than one messaging application? Adding support for other contact methods -- at least insofar as the site supports the current lineup -- would only be a couple of lines of code.

Feedbuddy has a good idea; matching people's interests based on the feeds they read makes a lot of sense. But as a social networking site it seems rather half baked right now, and it feels a lot more like a feature than a full on web site. I would suggest the Feedbuddy crew consider creating a Facebook application. That would not only solve the problem of being able to contact members through the site (users would just utilize Facebook's system), but also might expand the userbase, which seems a bit tech-centric at the moment, more rapidly and allow for more meaningful matches.

Now I'm a big admirer of Dave Winer, even though he's frequently controversial and a lot of people dis him. He's done great things for RSS and he deserves a lot of respect and kudos for that, so I'll always try to stick up for him. But in this case I have to take issue with his stance on ads in RSS feeds. (btw I have been posting about this issue all week on Silicon Valley Watcher).

I left the following comment on Dave's RSS-focused blog and I want to repeat it here. It's my reply to Dave and all the other people up in arms over ads in RSS feeds...

Richard's 2 Cents

I can't quite believe what I'm reading: you prefer excerpted RSS feeds to full-content?? Obviously this means you don't think RSS is a first-class content citizen, as HTML is - why else would anyone not put their full content into an RSS feed?

So you've pretty much answered the first 2 of the 3 questions I posted in response to your last post. But what I want to know is your answer to the third... ;-) (and I don't want to hear the 'I'll pay you by donation' argument from people, because clearly that doesn't scale unless you're Jason Kottke).

1) Which is better: an excerpted RSS feed (where you have to click through to read the whole post), or a full-text RSS feed with some ads?

Personally I'd prefer the latter.

2) Really, what *is* the difference between advertising in an RSS feed and advertising on a webpage? RSS is becoming the new HTML - why fight it?

3) What's wrong with Writers wanting to get paid for their work (just as software developers want to get paid for their work)?

Gnip, the Boulder, Colorado startup aiming to act as a clearinghouse for user activity updates from around the web, announced a partnership today with Canadian firm PostRank, to offer additional versions of Gnip-delivered data feeds, filtered by popularity. Gnip could already deliver anyone a big bucket of user data like photos from Flickr, submissions from Digg or slide shows from SlideShare - but now this partnership will allow customers the option of receiving only those items that were most commented on, linked-to, tweeted about, etc. It's wonky, but it's a whole lot of fun.

We use Postrank around the ReadWriteWeb team often: to make sure we don't miss big stories on niche blogs, to display the most recent break-out hits on other blogs we write about and to power the Community Management Aggregator that automatically delivers the hottest posts from community management experts to customers of our Guide to Online Community Management.

"I’m actually coming to the conclusion that the whole subscriptions mindset is a problem and that in future we’ll ‘graze’ for the most part instead of subscribing. As Zigbee sensors, RFID chips and GPS trackers proliferate we’ll be drowing in an RSS-everywhere world if we don’t change our approach.

We don‚Äôt subscribe to all the sensory feed in physical world, we sample, nibble, taste, glance. Taskable and OPod (and whatever Kosso‚Äôs working on) are first generation ‚ÄúFeed Grazers‚Ä? IMHO. They allow you to graze feeds without ever subscribing. All we need is for static OPML directories to proliferate and for OPML search engines (like Gada.be) to improve at building multi-level hierarchies on the fly."

Intrigued, I checked out the apps that James referenced. Taskable is described as "a new kind of RSS and OPML browser built into the Windows taskbar notification area." OPod is "an AJAX OPML and RSS viewer widget that you can embed in any web page you like." Uh, right. I'm none the wiser.

In another post, James calls them "on-demand feeds" - which is more grokable. So you only need these feeds for a short time, then you dispose of them... My Auckland friend Charles Coxhead has been exploring the notion of disposable feeds too.

It's an interesting concept and one which I obviously need to think more on - and read more of James' posts (and Charles too, when he gets around to posting about his experiments). 2006 seems to have become the year when we've realised that RSS, for all the benefits it brings of being able to subscribe to information, doesn't actually solve the core problem of information overload. Perhaps feed grazing, or on-demand feeds, is a step closer to solving the overload problem...