Dave Winer talks about Yahoo and their adoption of opml for subscription output. Very cool.
However, he finishes on a innocuous but really bloody important point – a standard way of representing an RSS/Atom/whatever feed to consumers…a simple subscribe button – as demoed on the right hand column of this blog.
It’s a small, but vital aspect of the development of RSS etc. as a power in the way the web is heading.
As I’ve mentioned before, an online assessment tool I’ve designed for a client will use RSS as the output from reports, to-do lists etc. and I fully expect not only other application vendors to subscribe to these feeds…but for individuals to subscribe as well through aggregators and possibly even other applications
Of course, they don’t care about the xml format, but they’ll instantly get the notion of subscription. And the white on orange is so universally adopted (e.g. BBC News uses white on orange ‘RSS’ buttons ), that people will recognise the _task_ and _expected outcome_ from clicking an orange button.
And all this was inspired from Microsoft’s adoption of RSS and their rather nifty t-shirts at Gnomedex.
RSS as a _concept_ of subscription, of information dashboards, of chosen information retrieval, is going to underpin and transform collaboration and knowledge enablement in organisations. All from a file format that’s plain text!