After a wait longer than the fiasco after the 2000 presidential election, the results are in. And the winner is...the candidate with the second greatest number of votes! From the general populous that is. The candidate with the most votes from the electoral college of judges won the day. "Webfeed" was selected last week as the winner of Amy Gahran's contest to choose a colloquial name for RSS.

Personally, I'm glad the contest had a panel of judges to make the final selection. "Elert", which got the most votes, certainly would not have gotten mine. It's far too narrow in it's meaning to capture the essence of RSS--there are far too many uses and potential uses for RSS which just don't quite fit it.

Webfeed isn't a bad name. Technically, it's not quite precise (as Amy mentions in the linked story). First of all, an RSS feed is not a web page. It may be linked to from the world wide web, but it's not part of it any more than a mailto link makes email part of the web. (If you're thinking, "sure email and RSS are part of the web", remember that the internet and the web aren't the same thing. The internet is the network--that's what RSS runs on and can be called part of. The web is stuff that you view in web browsers.) Well, whatever. It's close enough. The fact that I felt compelled to include that parenthetical reference is enough evidence of that for me. Second, the feed may not even refer to anything that is on the web (though most do).

That covers "web". What about "feed"? That's hard to say. Lots of people don't know what newsfeeds are yet, so the term won't help them particularly, but there are also a lot of people to whom it will mean something. So I have to admit that it's probably as good as any name...even though I don't particularly like it.

The funny thing about this contest is that it probably happened a few months too late. With the emergence of Atom and other potential contenders, what we need isn't a colloquial name for RSS, but a colloquial name for talking about RSS, Atom, Info Bite List, SDF, and whatever others may come along, all at once. Perhaps "webfeed" will get used that way, and we'll keep calling RSS "RSS" when we want to talk about it specifically. I for one plan to continue using the term "digest" to talk about all of them, and to stick with "RSS" for the one...okay, for the two that use that name.

Those who voted for "Elert" or some other name needn't fear. A recall election is already underway in the court of actual usage. Only time will tell what colloquial name, if any, will stick.

A side note not related to the normal topic of this blog: Some of you may be familiar with the css Zen Garden. Yesterday, I launched a spiritual brother to it, the CSS Trappist Monastery. The concept is the same, but it's a bit more ascetic in that designers are only allowed to use 12 minimalist images provided by the site. This should keep the site focused squarely on what can be accomplished using stylesheets alone.