At the Blog Business Summit yesterday we discovered just how bad RSS usability sucks. Molly Holzschalg was on stage with me and visited a blog and was trying to find its RSS feed. She couldn’t find it. Why? Cause there’s no consistency in this industry on how to subscribe.

Some sites use RSS icons. Most that I visit use the orange XML icon. But other sites don’t have any icon and instead use words like “subscribe” or “feed” or “web feed.”

Even others, like many Blogger sites, don’t have any icon or word with a link at all. For those you’ve gotta know to simply add “atom.xml” onto the end of the URL. Aaaaarrrrrrgggggghhhhhhh.

And then there’s sites like Dare Obasanjo’s. He’s a geek. Works at MSN. But look at the right side of his blog. He has four DIFFERENT icons for RSS. One for Yahoo. One for MSN. One for Bloglines. One for Newsgator.

Oh, I bet Jakob Nielsen is screaming right about now.

Whenever I hit problems like this I ask myself “what would Jeffrey Zeldman do?” Or WWJZD for short. 🙂

Why Jeffrey? He’s still leading the Web design movement forward and is my favorite writer and speaker on the topic.

I find his minimalistic answer unsatisfying. He puts a text link in very small type at the bottom of his page.

My advice? Stick with the orange XML icon. Why? It sticks out. If the page Molly was trying to deal with yesterday had one of those she would have found it instantly. The BBC’s answer is actually pretty good too. They went with an Orange RSS button and next to it have a link to “What is RSS.”

In fact, I think that’s really the best answer: “just do what the BBC does.”