Amy Gahran recently ran a contest to come up with a term that covered all the many flavors of syndication under one easy-to-use umbrella. The results were announced last week and the winner is "webfeed."
Knee-jerk reaction: I like it. And I'm usually very skeptical of neologisms. I usually think they're either too precious or too hyperbolic. In this case, the term is neither. I also like the distinction that Gahran draws between the "medium" and the "implementations." Personally, I'd like to spend more time talking about the medium, as opposed to the technical details, and it would be nice to have the vocubulary to do it smoothly. Plus, as Kottke has pointed out, "syndication" isn't really cutting it anymore.
Of course, that said, I have no idea if webfeeds will stick. Are there other examples of the popular lexicon being seriously affected by a contest?
Should we change the name of this site to "The Webfeeds Weblog"?
1. What if the feed is being generated straight from an XML file to a mobile device and never being rendered in HTML on a website? That isn't exactly a "web feed" that is more like what it truly is: an XML document accessible from the web. I guess unless we are putting anything available on the web and classifying as a web feed ... then this opens the door for radio streaming, P2P, voiceIP, etc. Web feed is probaby just too generic.
XML is the name that folks should be using, not "RSS" or "ATOM" or "fill in the blank" -- but then again some people still get confused when you mention HTML or CSS ... even the French government had trouble with the term "eMail" and changed it. Changing names for the sake of easing confusion is ill advised unless we are talking about scientific terms which in full form can be very hard to remember or shortening wods (as is the case with XML, HTML, CSS, etc).
Who cares what they call it anyway just how can it be used :)))
Posted at 4:46AM on Dec 19th 2005 by TDavid