There's no argument that web feeds (RSS, ATOM etc) are taking off. Many, many web sites (all the good ones, anyway) now have feeds that I can subscribe to.

Add to that the benefits of trackbacks, where linking from one site to another will provide a link on the destination site back to the source, and you have a whole new world of discoverability.

With the rise of blogs and web feeds, more and more developers are keeping track of news about their applications online. Microsoft themselves have dozens of feeds related to specific applications or technologies, like the IE7 blog, the RSS team blog, even the Photography blog for Vista's photo viewer.

So why is it so hard to find these blogs? Why do I have to learn about them via trackbacks or links from other blogs?

I believe that every application should have a news feed - one that's accessible from within the app. In IE7, the Internet Explorer Team Blog is in the feed subscriptions by default. That's excellent, but how about Vista's photo viewer? I haven't used it yet, but I'm guessing that there's no point of entry for the team's blog.

I was going to suggest that there should be a "Product News" menu item under every "Help" menu, but menu bars seem to be less and less common as developers try new and interesting ways of surfacing their application's functionality to the user. That's fine ... just give me a nice big button somewhere so I know what to do.

Comicster includes a "News" node in its tree view, which simply shows all the posts to my blog in the "Comicster" category. Works a treat.

It's not hard to do, guys, and you're probably already maintaining a blog. How about it? Give me the news in your application.