Yo mama 

In Philadelphia (the movie), the Denzel Washington character said "Explain it to me like I'm a 4-year-old." That might be a substitute for using "your mother" as the lowest common denominator user.

Anyway, sometimes I think too much is made of dumbing things down. It may not be just women of a certain age who are not respected by some confident young purveyors of technology tools. If they're thinking "we have to make this idiot-proof," aren't they thinking that their audience is the hoi polloi, the great unwashed?

I've been around that attitude in companies and organizations, and it makes me uncomfortable to hear employees disrespecting customers -- the source of their income, and their ultimate boss. I worry that the attitude may subsciously creep into dealings with customers or tend to dictate disrespectful strategies in approaches to them.

People will rise to the level of expectations of them. You shouldn't drag the majority down to the level of the least aware. It's insulting.

I should try to find something I wrote about this in the context of web design. Hang on a minute. I'm back. Here it is: Afraid of the word "subscribe."

I see what Dave and Les are saying 

Support site comments on the inclusion icon.

Once a node is opened and the user sees she's not going anywhere, it's then become apparent the information is still also here. And, like Dave says, it may not be important to most consumers of data where the data resides. The magic of inclusion may only be interesting to producers of the data.

It's this sort of thing that makes planning the support site such a challenge. So many different kinds of users at so many levels. I was even thinking maybe something should be said in the Grok section about the many internet users who are consuming information delivered in OPML, and they don't even know it, or need to. It's kind of like the MyYahoo users who subscribe to RSS feeds and don't know what RSS is.

But, it only needs to be said in passing. The site is about the tool, so the audience is producers of data.

No, wait a minute, that's not even true. Somebody who wants to use just NewsRiver is not necessarily a maker of anything. Should there be sections in the docs like "If you don't think you need anything but the aggregator, read this."

I have kind of a gut feel that most prospective users of the editor will be maker types. You use the editor if you are an editor? What do you think?

I should post this over on the Manila site so we can talk about it.

I want that 

Donovan points to old shownotes made in Radio. Do Mac users get those little document icons for links in place of the up arrow we Windows people have?

Or... 

Maybe something like this says "out there but also still here."

Wilk poses a question 

How do you keep up with OPML blogs?

I don't subscribe to anybody's blog. I just watch the changes page. But I check in compulsively. It helps that we all link to each other so much.

Speaks to a geek 

Follow the conversation.

All together 

Oh, right. Should look at it within the app.

Include icon? 

Facing curly braces also are the symbol for a hug, which would be friendly.

Shouldn't say anything without talking to her, but Hil might be between projects and makes a nice icon. I haven't fired up Icon Forge for years and never could quite make the smallest ones look like anything, one pixel at a time.