Scoble reports from the Blog Business Summit:

At the Blog Business Summit yesterday we discovered just how bad RSS usability sucks. Molly Holzschalg was on stage with me and visited a blog and was trying to find its RSS feed. She couldn’t find it. Why? Cause there’s no consistency in this industry on how to subscribe.

Some sites use RSS icons. Most that I visit use the orange XML icon. But other sites don’t have any icon and instead use words like “subscribe” or “feed” or “web feed.”

Even others, like many Blogger sites, don’t have any icon or word with a link at all. For those you’ve gotta know to simply add “atom.xml” onto the end of the URL. Aaaaarrrrrrgggggghhhhhhh.

The icons are for the minority of the audience that knows what they are. Most people are going to interact with RSS in one of two ways:

• Their favorite browser will do auto-discovery for them, and offer to subscribe for them
• They'll try to subscribe (in their aggregator) to the main page, and the aggregator will do auto-discovery for them. BottomFeeder does the latter already; is there an aggregator out there that doesn't?

No one (with the possible exception of Dave Winer) expects people to look for orange icons. One way or another, they expect to have the "right thing" just happen.