It’s been a while since I checked in on the spread of “webfeed,” the winning non-techie nickname for RSS- and Atom-format feeds, as decided by a contest I held several month ago via this weblog. I’m amazed at how widely this term is being adopted. It’s not yet as popular as RSS feed, but it appears to have gained considerable ground in the court of common usage…
*** UPDATE OCT. 4: This is pretty cool. Neil McIntosh, assistant editor of the UK’s Guardian Unlimited, made this terminology comment today: “…I’m also happy that someone’s noticed GU’s grand new webfeeds, and the fact we’re not calling them XML, or RSS, or anything similarly geeky. Maybe we should license out the shiny new webfeeds icon?”
BIG PICTURE: SEARCH RESULT STATISTICS
One way to gauge how widespread a new term has become is to search for it in some of the major search engines. This isn’t a perfect method, but it does offer useful context.
Today I searched the following resources for any pages containing either webfeed or webfeeds. Here’s what I found:
- Google: 53,200 results (I excluded results from my domain contentious.com and my subdomains wp.contentious.com and blog.contentious.com to filter out my own mentions of this term.)
- Yahoo: 132,200 results (Domain exclusions not available, so this would include my own mentions of the term.)
- Feedster: 468 results (Searches webfeeds only)
- Blogdigger: 254 results (Searches webfeeds only)
ODDITIES THAT SOMEWHAT INFLATE THESE RESULTS
Several years ago, Moreover Technologies did use the term webfeed to describe an early RSS-based headline aggregator service, now called FeedDirect. That usage doesn’t contradict the meaning of the current nickname webfeed, so I didn’t exclude results containing Moreover from my overall figures. However, just for context, a Google search for moreover webfeed conducted today yielded 754 results, mostly from 2000 and 2001. The same search on Yahoo yielded 891 results.
Also, some people use the term webfeed to describe a live webcast or streaming audio/video. For example, see this recent posting from Hoopsavvy.
WHO’S SAYING “WEBFEED?”
Here is a representative and thoroughly incomplete list of blogs and sites that have picked up the term webfeed either regularly or occasionally, or to refer to their own webfeeds. The links are to posts or pages containing the “w” word:
- Abraham Journal
- Article Manager, a popular content management system, includes a webfeed generator
- ClassBrain.com
- Collaborative Learning Environments
- Cutting Through
- CyDome (In German)
- Dirk Weber (in German)
- Daily Inspirational Quotes
- Evangelical Lutheran Church in America
- Fables of the Reconstruction
- FactsCanada
- Fred’s Weblog (in Dutch)
- Granny Buttons
- The Guardian Major daily UK newspaper
- Jots has a whole webfeed category
- Institute for the Study of Homelessness and Poverty
- Lawfinder, a service of InfoLaw (UK)
- NevOn
- New Media Hack
- NewsTrolls
- Online Business Journal
- PerfectXML
- Planetizen Planning and Development Network
- The Power of Many
- Qumana.com
- Radio Free Blogistan
- Seb’s Open Research
- Seblogging
- UI Designer
- View from the Isle
- Webfeed Central
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