I”m pleased to see that the BBC is starting to use the new standard feed icon and is adopting the term ‘news feeds’ in place of ‘RSS feeds’. At the time of writing, the new approach could be seen on the BBC News homepage and several of the BBC’s blogs, including Nick Robinson’’s Newslog and The Editors, as well as on the News feeds from the BBC page which explains what feeds are and how to use them.

Replacing the term ‘RSS feeds’ with ‘news feeds’, ‘web feeds’, or even just ‘feeds’, presents the concept in a simpler and more straightforward way, making it much more accessible to web users. It’s not a new idea - web professionals including Asa Dotzler have for some time argued that using ”RSS feeds” as a feature name is equivalent to calling webpages ”HTML pages”. The place for ”RSS” is in the description of how web feeds work and the technology behind them.

The Telegraph is another example of a high-profile website which has adopted the standard feed icon, although it combines the icon with ”RSS feeds” as a feature name. The Guardian, on the other hand, mainly uses ”web feeds” but is not yet using the standard icon. I hope to see more high-profile websites making the transition to the standard feed icon and more user-friendly terminology in the near future.