Matt McAlister reports:
There have been a few attempts to solve this problem and a lot of people talking about solving this problem. Why do I have to include on my blog a little subscribe image for every RSS reader people use? Why can't someone invent a one-click auto signup solution that knows what reader I use? It's not a very complicated technology problem to solve, but until now, there wasn't an elegant solution for it.
Pete Freitag solved the problem with Solosub. You simply enter the URL of your RSS feed on Solosub.com. The tool then gives you the link to publish on your blog. When users click that link, they will be invited to select which RSS reader they want your RSS feed to be sent to. The user can choose to have Solosub remember that choice, and, from then on, the user will just click on any RSS feed that uses Solosub and suddenly be subscribed to that feed via their reader of choice.
Ug. This didn't solve anything, it just moved all those aggregator choices from your page to theirs! I'm beginning to think there is no hope for these orange badges. It's just a hack during the transition from browsing to aggregating.
There's got to be a better way to convert a visitor from browser to subscriber. Maybe its time to kill the badges, and let the browser's RSS button do the right thing (either send it to another app, or send it to a URL, depending on the user's preference).
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