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Many people are still struggling with the concept of feeds (RSS, Atom, whatever). I don’t blame them. Feeds are not exactly intuitive to your average person (even your average net user). The profusion of bad jargon, cryptic icons, geek elitism, and klunky tools for feeds haven’t exactly helped, either.

In my experience, once people grasp the concept of what feeds do, it’s then easier for them to understand how feeds work – which then helps them actually start to use feeds.

This is why explaining why feeds matter was the core of the talk I gave yesterday to a public relations group. I’d been asked to speak on the future of technology – and it seems to me that if people can grasp the feed concept and start using feeds, then most of the communication technologies that are likely to become crucial over the next several years will make much more sense.

Over at The Intuitive Life Business Blog, my friend Dave Taylor is struggling with a similar issue. I just read his Oct. 18 posting, “What we needs is a great metaphor for RSS,” and commented on it.

I agree with Dave, we do need a great metaphor for this linchpin technology/channel/medium. I’d love to hear what Contentious readers have to say about this issue – especially since so many of you have managed to “get” the feed concept that the e-mail alert service for this weblog is now on hiatus.

Here’s what I said in my comment to Dave’s post…

Hi, Dave.

Great minds think alike! Explaining feeds was the core of a talk I gave yesterday to the CO chapter of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA). I posted the audio of that talk as a podcast and I also posted my handout as a downloadable pdf .

You wrote: “…And no, I’m not talking about some superficial renaming of RSS to webfeed; that won’t solve the problem either.”

Being the person who held the contest to come up with a nongeeky nickname (not a renaming, just a nicknaming, mind you) of “RSS,” the winner of which was “webfeed,” may I officially say: Ouch!

Nah, no biggie – a nickname is a superficial matter, after all. However, in general acronyms are offputting to non-geeks, notwithstanding a few very rare exceptions like “TV.” (Honestly I don’t think “RSS” makes that cut and it never will.) So geeky acronyms are indeed a real barrier to acceptance of a new technology. (Let alone that “RSS” is only one type of feed format. There is also the Atom standard, and there probably will be others in the future.)

Terminology does indeed matter. So does metaphor.

For a while now I’ve just been saying “feed” because that’s exceptionally descriptive of what this technology DOES: It feeds people a steady diet of fresh content.

Personally I like your “news wire” metaphor, but I doubt it makes quite as much sense to people who, unlike you and me, haven’t worked in the news business.

Yeah, we all have seen movies from the 1930s - 1970s where reporters rip paper stories off machines and scamper away to their typewriters, so that gives considerable cultural support to that metaphor… for now.

But how much would the news wire metaphor mean to someone in their 20s today (who might have been born in, say, 1981)? How much will it mean to someone who’s 12 years old today? We might as well be referring to a butter churn or quill pen.

Personally, I think the most effective metaphors are visceral in that they relate to fundamentally human roles and functions or to common real-world objects or processes. Such metaphors make the best and longest-lasting idiomatic expressions, like “sitting on” an idea, or giving someone “the runaround.”

“News wire” is a cultural/technological artifact of a particular media. Although it’s vivid, I don’t think it meets the “universally human and visceral” criteria.

Personally, I would like to see a metaphor for “RSS” based on the concept of “feeding” – that is, delivering a steady supply of content, just like you feed a baby spoonfuls of pureed squash. It implies the benefit of precise, timely delivery and effortless consumption. (Bib not included.)

So I’ll think more about this. Thanks for getting my gears going. Maybe we should get an animator in on this, whadya think?

- Amy Gahran
Editor, Contentious