the power of 0ne

Test post for http://euro.weblogs.com ...

The first episode of Trade Secrets (warning: link is to an mp3 of the show) aired yesterday and I'm already hooked.

Trade Secrets is the first (to my knowledge) two person audio blog, and it features my two favourite audio bloggers: Dave Winer and Adam Curry!

I'm already subscribed to the RSS feed (with enclosures).

Don Park made a recent post on Firefox's RSS Support, here's what he had to say: "Words like crappy and useless come to mind".

Don, I think you missed the point completely and here's why:

Getting RSS into something as mainstream as the browser is a big deal. It opens up RSS to a whole new set of people who have never seen it before.

Now the implementation is broken, it doesn't read all of feeds and doesn't have a lot of power. But it is a start.

I believe that as developers who understand the power of RSS we have an obligation to do better than statements like: "this feature sucks". At the very least, we should outline what the problems are and how the can be fixed.

In that spirit here is what I think the Firefox Developpers need to do:

1. Fix the reader so that it doesn't rely on optional elements.
2. Fix the autodiscovery so that it finds more feeds.
3. There needs to be a link to a more powerful aggregator features. Live bookmarks are useful for only a small set RSS feeds. Phil Rignalda outlines some of these in his comments to Don's post (scroll down to see them). For Firefox a plug into Thunderbird and / or a link to a page that describes Aggregators and provides links to a few of the best should do it. This could show up as a 2nd option called "Subscribe in Aggregator" when you click the Orange RSS button, if no Aggregator is found send the user to an information page.

Of all of these fixes the last one is the most important, RSS can do so much more than just power Live Bookmarks and the Firefox RSS button needs to show this.

Postscript: To be fair to Don his attitude is quite different in the comments to his own post, but most readers won't get that far...