Elbowruminations Graphic Design Trends, Tips and Reviews

While RSS (Really Simple Syndication) remains a shadowy figure lurking in the alleys behind traditional websites, the majority of web users are quite happy clicking about without the faintest understanding of what RSS means or does. For those that do know how to use it, perhaps less than 10% of the online general public, most are super geeks with intimate working knowledge of the past five space flights. In support of this point, Bloglines lists ten of the most read blogs through RSS subscriptions. Included on this list are Wired Magazine, Dilbert, and Slashdot among other geeky haunts. RSS, in addition to being unpopular, has never really been used in a retail setting at all.

Until Now that is! Home Depot in Canada is an exception and perhaps the only retailer we could find presently willing to experiment with RSS. The Hammer Drop is a daily web exclusive sales item that is offered to customers via their RSS reader. This product is different each day, is available for that day only and is “dropped” at 8 am. As an example, today, the item being offered is 25 Ft. Powered Tape Measure for the Hammer Drop price of only $14.95.

It may be obvious to state that sales through retail RSS feeds, despite being a dream come true for commission sales people, it’s not going to become a viable method of making money until everyone understands what it does. You might be wondering along with us, what it will take for RSS to become understandable to consumers. We have a couple of suggestions to share.

Firstly retailers like Home Depot doing what they are doing by embracing new technology is a great way to make advancements like RSS common place. It should also be noted the Hammer Drop is part of a series of Home Depot web 2.0ish experiments such as an online auction, a customer product review option, and a Yahoo Answers-like forum.

Secondly, if RSS is to become a valid and relevant distribution method for online news sources, retailers and really anyone outside of the blogosphere, it needs to be made consumer friendly. Integral to this process is the challenge of re-naming RSS appropriately to be comparable in nature to a similar product in the real world rather than attempting to promote the baffling process of burning feeds and syndicating posts. Perhaps by naming it after a reality based procedure that mirrors the way it works, the general public will be quicker to catch on. Using e-mail as an example, the concept of an electronic inbox and a way to send mail electronically rather than “postally” makes electronic mail easy to understand.

RSS needs a similar analogy and when you put it into the perspective of news delivery, this approach to RSS could very well be the online answer to today’s hard-copy publishing woes. Imagine your trusted neighborhood news syndicate stepping in, buying your trusted RSS reader, re-naming it Paperboy and adopting the tagline: Your Virtual News Delivery Service. How far away at this point is an RSS subscription fee? Maybe these are the kind of corporate alliances we can expect to see in the near future.

Whatever the future holds, perhaps a better name for an RSS feed reader is an e-box. Part e-mail, part newspaper box, a source for all your online information, and a loyal companion to your inbox. This of course, is simply a helpful suggestion from your friends at Elbowruminations while we wait for someone at Wired magazine (or the Home Depot) to devise a trendy term that really catches on.

Social Networking could well be the future of news syndication. More and more relevant daily information comes to us through websites like Facebook, Digg, and Delicious, rather than traditional sources like the paperboy or the evening news. With this being the case, it’s not unusual to see a growing number of mainstream establishments and traditional news sources beginning to hesitantly embrace social networking as a viable means of information distribution.

Traditional news sources have not typically been very eager to allow the shift of web 2.0 ideals to influence how business is done and it’s not hard to see why. As online data distribution gains popularity and credibility as a convenient method of becoming informed, finding your daily newspaper on the front porch is more often being replaced with an online source instead. The benefits of saving money and saving paper are both two major factors working against hard copy publishing. Perhaps seeing things from this perspective makes it easier to sympathize with old-school editors initially responding to income erosion by digging their heels in, as this alternative is much simpler than attempting to uncover ways of morphing into an equitable position through online solutions.

After trying it for two years, it seems that The New York Times has discovered simply charging an online subscription fee is not the answer. In September the newspaper announced that they will no longer be charging a fee for any online content. The next step for newspapers and printed publications to make money in an online world is not obvious. They could take their next move from the music industry’s play book and take radical legal action whenever possible and refuse to sell anything online which is most likely not the way to go. Alternatively, it may be worth joining the fray like NewsCorp did with their MySpace acquisition.

The Globe and Mail also seems to be willing to experiment albeit on a smaller scale. Their social bookmarking and interaction tools on globeandmail.com are some of the most professional and advanced solutions you’ll see on any site let alone a newspaper’s website. Interactive tools are found in the top right corner of every story with sharing options, comment submission, and even a wide range of licensing options. The Globe and Mail seems to approach this trend in a way that encourages social networking without alienating readers who don’t understand the myriad of mysterious icons. Contrast this approach with the Calgary Herald which uses a more traditional visual approach and hides the networking options in the middle of the page.

Making social networking options accessible and easy to use is a great way to encourage bloggers to cite you as a source and although it may not be the saviour of traditional media outlets it certainly shows how forward thinking an organization is prepared to be in order to stay relevant and competitive.

With the value of good data being a valuable currency among online sources, newspapers still have the upper hand, but have a limited amount of time to meet the deadline of finding better ways to syndicate. Partnerships with or acquisitions of tech firms may be the next best step to take before Amazon and its Kindle wireless reader, Google, or Yahoo effectively archive paper media.

If you ever design and prepare graphics for the web, you know that getting the image sizes and colours to match up with the site can sometimes be an ugly process. We’ve found that using a couple super easy Firefox extensions has pretty much eliminated the hassle of combing through source code or working with screenshots to get the images right.

The first one is called MeasureIt. It’s a ruler device that tells you the height and width of any area you highlight. Just click on the icon in the corner of your browser, and you are given a translucent blue box that you can drag to fit any element you’re looking to measure.

MeasureIt was created by Kevin Freitas, and can be downloaded right here.

The second tool is called ColorZilla. This gives you an eyedropper tool that will tell you the colour values of any element in your browser – whether the colour you want is the background on a page, one part of a photo, or even the colour of an icon in your browser’s bookmarks toolbar.

ColorZilla then gives you the RGB and hex values of the colour, and lets you copy it to the clipboard for use in other applications.

This link will let you download ColorZilla, which was developed by Alex Sirota.

Those are a couple of the best Firefox plugins that we recommend for web designers: quick, easy ways to grab the info you need to let your graphics work better on the page.

And that’s all for our very first Daily Designer tip.