Microsoft presented a demo of IE7's Web feeds at the Blog Business Summit in San Francisco. What we know at this point is that an orange button (not an XML chicklet) collects feeds from a Web page and adds them to Bookmarks (I guess it's called Favorites in IE). The demo also included a function whereby non-feed content, such as the real estate listings used in the demo, is packaged into a subscribable feed by IE. That sounds interesting.

Some controversy is still brewing over the abandonment of "RSS" as a feature name. It is utterly ridiculous that Microsoft is taking heat for this, since not only is it a good idea to find another name, but other big players have done the same thing without criticism. Yahoo! avoids the R-word while investing deeply in RSS distribution. Firefox, which nobody would dare call uncool, likewise fails to mention "RSS" in its subscription feature; it calls RSS feeds "Live Bookmarks." Web Feed is a better, more descriptive name than Live Bookmarks, and I encourage Microsoft to stick with it.