RSS for the mainstream

Steve Outing at Poynter Online posts that some feed readers are going out of their way to hide the word RSS from their users. He quotes Rob Jan de Heer as saying:

We never mentioned the word RSS. Ever. Because this product is meant for the average computer user, not the computer wizards most of us are. And let's face it, most people have never heard of RSS.

Exactly right. Why expose things called RSS, Atom, and XML to readers at all? Do they care what these data formats are? No, only geeks like us care. Mainstream readers just want to read news.

See also my earlier post, "XML is for geeks".