Feed Icons : Identify Syndicated Content & RSS Feeds

Feeds are a convenient way of reading and tracking updated content of interest. How do you identify syndicated content – usually by small orange buttons saying XML, RSS etc. Now there is a new popular icon in the blogosphere…

Feed Icons is an effort by Matt Brett to spread the firefox initiated orange logo as an identity for syndicated content. A post introducing the New Standard Feed Icon says

“Mozilla has done a great job of making feeds more accessible. They presented an icon to identify a site that had content that could be syndicated and made it easy to use by introducing Live Bookmarks. Now it’s our turn! By our, I mean web site designers, developers, bloggers… anyone who contributes to a website in any way. Do away with those disgusting orange buttons, start using “feed” for all kinds of syndication and drop one of these icons on your site.”

Even Microsoft seems to be happy to use this icon and agree that it’s in the user’s best interest to have one common icon to represent RSS and RSS-related features in a browser. A post on the Microsoft Team RSS Blog says -

“I’m excited to announce that we’re adopting the icon used in Firefox. John and Chris were very enthusiastic about allowing us (and anyone in the community) to use their icon. This isn’t the first time that we’ve worked with the Mozilla team to exchange ideas and encourage consistency between browsers, and we’re sure it won’t be the last.

We’ll be using the icon in the IE7 command bar whenever a page has a feed associated with it, and we’ll also use it in other places in the browser whenever we need a visual to represent RSS and feeds.”

Download the free icon package and customize the icon to the colour of your liking as the feed icon is recognizable enough that it doesn’t need to be restricted to one colour. Currently you might see this icon on firefox whenever there is a syndicated content available and you can subscribe to RSS / Atom feeds and if you use live bookmarks.