Long before bloggers begged readers to share posts on Twitter and Facebook with branded badges and widgets, there was another plea: Subscribe to my blog! While the call to arms was simple, its visual manifestation was diverse.

Across the web, a sea of custom buttons from Bloglines, Feedster, Yahoo and others asked folks to subscribe to RSS feeds using their service.

Somehow, the orange icon you see above has become synonymous with RSS and news feeds. With our very own Embed button on our minds, we’ve been wondering just how this happened. We’ve done a bit of Internet Archaeology to find out.

Left to their own designs, websites wielding RSS gravitated towards a generic icon. Well, it wasn’t so much an icon as it was the letters “RSS” stamped on an orange background, similar in spirit to HTML validation badges. Although it’s fairly straightforward, the text-based icon made for an amusing misinterpretation, in at least one instance.

Despite this strain of uniformity, a significant amount of variation still existed. What’s more, there were other formats such as ATOM to account for.

Image courtesy of the RSS Advisory Board, licensed CC BY-SA 2.0.

In early 2005, Dave Winer, considered the patriarch of RSS, voiced his concern with the proliferation of custom icons. “Anyway, all those logos, when will it end? I can’t imagine that Microsoft is far behind, and then someday soon CNN is going to figure out that they can have their own branded aggregator for their own users (call me if you want my help, I have some ideas about this) and then MSNBC will follow, and Fox, etc.,” Winer mused. “Sheez even Best Buy and Circuit City will probably have a ‘Click here to subscribe to this in our aggregator’ button before too long.”

Later that year, Winer suggested that an orange button with “SUBSCRIBE” in white text should be the standard.

Luckily for Winer (and the rest of the Internet), Mozilla had already designed what would become the standard RSS icon. A year earlier, Stephen Horlander crafted the ubiquitous symbol to represent Firefox’s Live Bookmarks, which let users subscribe to and read RSS feeds right within their bookmarks. Initially, Mozilla used an orange badge with “RSS” in white text, but since the feature also supported Atom feeds, the change was made for consistency’s sake.

Image courtesy of Kevin Gerich.

Above are some of Horlander’s early sketches for a Live Bookmark icon. In an alternate reality, one of these might be ubiquitous with RSS — we’d say the center one could work.

In the fall of 2005, Microsoft began the search for a better icon to symbolize feeds, RSS or otherwise. As its first step, the Internet Explorer team trotted out five potential designs and mulled over feedback.

Image courtesy of Microsoft.

If Microsoft made the decision in a vacuum, one of these would have been the face of RSS, at least for IE7 users.

In December, Microsoft announced that it struck a deal with Mozilla to adopt and standardize its icon, beginning with IE7. The following day, the Outlook 12 team revealed they’d follow suit. It didn’t take much longer for web designers to run with the symbol.

In March of 2006, the RSS Board proposed that folks support the common feed icon. By the summer, Mozilla began hashing out usage guidelines for the icon, and Opera moved to adopt it.

Although RSS managed to score consistent branding, it’s no longer the hot topic it once was in the blogosphere. Heck, just ask Google. Ironically, the tech is the largely-hidden backbone of the podcast world, making subscriptions to shows possible through the likes of iTunes and other services. Still, for many, an orange square with white waves emanating from a single node will always scream RSS.