Steve Rubel at MicroPersuasion has conducted an interesting study on major brands and Wikipedia. The study found that on average, Wikipedia articles appear as result number 11 in Google searches on the top 100 brands in the United States (by advertising spend) - just outside of the first page of results. Many of the brands had Wikipedia articles on the first page - Chevrolet and McDonald’’s, for example, both returned a Wikipedia article at number 4.

Steve’s conclusion is that companies need to ensure they keep an eye on what Wikipedia says about their company / brand. He also makes the important point that it should strictly be a case of ‘look but don’t touch’ - the neutral stance that Wikipedia aims for makes it inappropriate and inadvisable for companies to manipulate entries. Jeff Jarvis echoes this point on his blog.

I”m pleased to see that the BBC is starting to use the new standard feed icon and is adopting the term ‘news feeds’ in place of ‘RSS feeds’. At the time of writing, the new approach could be seen on the BBC News homepage and several of the BBC’s blogs, including Nick Robinson’’s Newslog and The Editors, as well as on the News feeds from the BBC page which explains what feeds are and how to use them.

Replacing the term ‘RSS feeds’ with ‘news feeds’, ‘web feeds’, or even just ‘feeds’, presents the concept in a simpler and more straightforward way, making it much more accessible to web users. It’s not a new idea - web professionals including Asa Dotzler have for some time argued that using ”RSS feeds” as a feature name is equivalent to calling webpages ”HTML pages”. The place for ”RSS” is in the description of how web feeds work and the technology behind them.

The Telegraph is another example of a high-profile website which has adopted the standard feed icon, although it combines the icon with ”RSS feeds” as a feature name. The Guardian, on the other hand, mainly uses ”web feeds” but is not yet using the standard icon. I hope to see more high-profile websites making the transition to the standard feed icon and more user-friendly terminology in the near future.

The leader of the Conservative party is currently in India, and anyone who wants to know what he’s getting up to over there can read the David Cameron in India blog. There’s only one post so far, which outlines his reasons for arranging the visit and includes a video clip filmed at Heathrow, but I think it’’s a promising start - the relaxed tone of the video works particularly well and offsets the more formal written post.

The blog is hosted on the free Blogger platform, which is a good choice for blogs like this which are intended to have a short life-span, and the simple set-up helps put the emphasis on the content, rather than the technology.