One thing I really am falling in love with is RSS feeds, I blog about them here enough that any regular reader should know this by now. The “official” symbol is the big orange thing to the left here. I have it in quotes because there is no official symbol yet, that is just the most adopted one, although you could see it in different colors or with different web 2.0 treatments. In any event, you are likely to see them on just about any blog you visit these days, including this one, currently in the top right corner of the sidebar.

I’ve been reading The Raw Feed for a few months now, not sure how I found the site but there are some great articles and it sits happily in my Google custom homepage. There is no mistaking the location of their RSS feed icon, it is huge! This seems to be some new trend for blogs, I’m still not sure why. John Chow created what he calls the world’s largest RSS icon, but anyone with an image editing program can make a bigger one.

Today I found a new addition to my growing list of sites I’m subscribing too called The Uber-Review via a link on Daily Blog Tips. Great site, quality content, worth subscribing too without a doubt, go check it out. They have a larger then normal header image and I run my monitor at 1280×1024, but as soon as I scrolled down a bit I saw one of the largest RSS icons on a webpage, ever! It’s huge, like seriously way out of place. What strikes me as really odd is that with as big as these icons are, there is no, “how-to” about RSS feeds. I’ve found through this blog and others I run that showing people how to use RSS feeds can be helpful in gaining readers, if you don’t know what that huge orange thing is why would you click it? What can the point really be? Is bigger really better?

Update: Over at Daily Blog Tips, Vic (owner of Uber-Review) commented on my mini-rant about the size of icons

The day I placed the large button on the site was the single greatest jump in subscribers and that pace has not stopped ever since.

So apparantly bigger is better.

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