Kevin Burton’s NEW FeedBlog

Dare thinks that browsers will save us from the subscription problem:

As long as people expect one click subscription to depend on websites using the right icons, the right HTML and the right MIME types for their documents it won’t become widespread. On the other hand, this debate is about to become moot anyway because every major web browser is going to have a [Subscribe to this website] button on it in a year or so. Firefox already has Live Bookmarks, there’s Safari RSS for Mac OS X users and Internet Explorer 7 will have Web Feeds.

The problem all along has been that users seriously can’t figure out what’s going on. There’s no standardized UI. While some sites do have XML buttons a significant percentage do not. Having a browser which supports auto-discovery and can easily subscribe to a feed will seriously change the dynamics here.

Right now we only have 11% of blog readers using RSS. Once this problem is solved and users are introduced to RSS directly in their browser we should expect this number to grow significantly.