I spend a lot of time thinking about bringing feed reading to a wider audience. A sobering statistic is that the overwhelming majority of web users, upwards of 95%, have no knowledge of the technology or how it can help them stay on top of content they're interested in.
One of the larger obstacles to adoption has been the lack of a consistent, user friendly mechanism for identifying and subscribing to feeds on the web. A widely adopted auto-discovery markup convention and browserintegration have improved the experience dramatically. Publishers now have a mechanism by which they can provide the user with notification that feeds are available. However, in practice, current implementations can give confusing results. This is due largely to the LINK tag convention suffering from the classic invisible metadata problem: data that is out of sight easily falls into disrepair. Broken links, duplicate feeds, and invalid or poorly written titles are common in LINK tags and lead to ambiguous results like this:
