The winning RSS nickname is: webfeed. This was entered by CONTENTIOUS reader Joshua Jabbour.
This winner was selected by my panel of judges. It also ranked second-highest in the popular voting. Although the nickname elert garnered a few more popular votes than webfeed, the judges believe that webfeed draws a clearer distinction between the concepts of RSS feeds and e-mail alerts.
This contest was rather contentious, and I expect that the winning name will not suit everyone. Well, nothing suits everyone this is not a one-size-fits-all world. Personally, even I have mixed feelings about the term webfeed because one can publish online content by feed only. (That is, the feed may be the publication, and it may not be associated with new Web content.) However, this is a technical point, and a minor one at that, since the vast majority of webfeeds at this time do refer to updated Web content.
The larger issue is that this nickname eliminates an unnecessary acronym, thus making the concept of feeds more accessible and appealing to a general audience.
So for now, I’ll experiment with using the terms webfeed as well as the more generic feed. I’ll occasionally throw in the term RSS because it is currently popular among early adopters and thus would likely be used in search queries of this blog. Likewise I’m altering a category heading in this blog from “RSS Ramblings” to “Webfeeds (RSS)” to indicate transitioning terminology.
More thoughts on this contest…
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