Good point about the subscription language. I suppose I could put “(For Free!)” or something like that, although I’m not sure where I’d slip that in. Will have to think about it.

Feeds do have a pretty low recognition factor. I think I saw in slashdot a link to a study that found 6% of people were aware of them. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to have a post introducing them, although I’d guess more than 6% of the audience for this site knows about RSS, etc.

They are so convenient for keeping track of web sites that I think people would appreciate them if they understood their utility, and if they tend to read a lot of blogs and news sites. So maybe they’ll catch on more if blogs continue to gain in popularity and people begin to read more and more of them.

One: your feed icon is unusually small, at least for us Firefox users: 10×10 instead of the more typical 24×24 or 32×32. May even be hard to click on for people with big resolutions (the lucky b*@&ards).

Two: the choice of the word “subscription”, however appropriate, is somewhat unfortunate; people have gotten rather used to associating the words “subscribe” and “subscription” on any kind of link with someone sticking their hand in their pocket. Usually, unless you’re willing to give some dubious, anonymous web site operator your credit card number, such links are dead-ends — except when they’re links to feeds, of course…

Three: I doubt feed readers will really come into their own until it’s possible to compose a comment in one and easily submit it. Unfortunately, any API for doing so is likely to be a link spam magnet, so it’ll never happen …