Embracing and extending the feed icon

Khoi Vinh’s group at the NY Times is thinking about embracing and extending the Firefox and IE7 feed icon. One of their designers proposed the following modifications:

Really very nicely done. What I don’t get is how the ‘RSS 2.0’, ‘ATOM FEED’, and ‘XML’ labels are going to make things clearer. And what the hell is ‘XML VIDEO’? Some experimental new XML-based video format?

The whole point of the new feed icon was to eliminate the confusion brought on by all these different acronyms. There’s really no reason to offer the exact same content in different feed formats.

The problem with the NY Times podcasts page is not that it offers the same content in different feed formats, but that it allows you to subscribe to the same content with different tools.

You can click to add the subscription to your default feed reader, you can click to add the subscription to your podcasts in iTunes and you can click to add it to your My Yahoo page.

Want to make this less confusing? Here’s how:

Subscribe (default)
Subscribe in iTunes
Add to your My Yahoo page