Acceptable losses: catering to newbies at the expense of the majority 

Now I'm paying attention to how RSS is described everywhere I run into it. I just did a fresh install of Expression Engine, so I noticed how the invitation to subscribe to a feed is presented in the default template. I hadn't looked at an out-of-the-box template for a year. Look way down the right-hand column on this page, which, for the moment, uses the default template. Most people will never change the language there.

It says:

Syndicate

- RSS 1.0

- RSS 2.0

- Atom

Aside from offering too many choices, I don't think it's clear or accurate to use the word "syndicate." Not for users, because they are not doing the syndicating, any more than I am syndicating a news story on Reuters. I'm just reading it.

I guess if you're going to use a verb like that (in the second person singular with an understood "you"), the right one would be "subscribe." Although... I was surprised a few weeks ago to learn that even the term "subscribe" will throw a few people. Five or six mailing list newbies thought I was trying to trick them into buying a magazine subscription!

But see, this is like the RSS versus web feeds naming issue -- at least the part of the debate that speaks to clearing away confusion for newcomers to RSS. Some new users are going to be confused no matter how you present a thing. If you accept that you have to leave a few newbies in the dust, then I think the question becomes what percentage of newbies do you plan to leave in the dust so that you don't start to really annoy or confuse the majority. It's a trade-off, a matter of acceptable losses. I wonder if real usability people have some kind of formula for that. I've never read anything about it. I'm just going on instinct.

In the mailing list case, we're talking about five people out of 2,900. What is that? Two-tenths of one percent? So, tell me, should I avoid using the word "subscribe" for those people even though it's descriptive, it's the convention, and the majority gets it?

You can only do so much coddling, and only so much overexplaining, and only so much dragging everybody down to the LCD. Let the few who don't understand ask the person over the cubicle wall or their kid or somebody else in their real life to clue them in so everybody else can keep moving.

This is funny 

The application my computer suggests for an FOAF file is iPodder.

Flashy newsletter 

Macromedia does a Flash version of its Macromedia Edge Newsletter. Seems appropriate. It's nice. I think people like not having to scroll to read stuff like this. And there is a printable version of each story in HTML, too. Hope they don't feel they have to do things like make printable versions in PDF now. I wonder when they start the rebranding. Haven't heard anything about that. Maybe after all the version 8 stuff ships and settles down?