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BBC icons for consuming digital audio

The BBC is offering free MP3s of the nine Beethoven symphonies. (Yay!) Because they also have audio streams and podcasts available, they’ve developed a set of icons to help users differentiate between the three types of links:

Although the icons for radio streaming and downloading are fairly understandable to non-techies, the podcast icon (orange button with the word “XML” in white) requires an understanding of the history of podcasting (via RSS feeds) in order to be understood. (I doubt, for example, that my mom would get it.) It can also be confusing, because this icon is already extensively used on the web for general RSS feeds.

This is odd, because given the iconic design of the iPod itself it should be easy to make a representative button. How about this:

I understand that they may be concerned with alienating owners of non-iPod MP3 players, but it is called podcasting.

June 14, 2005 | Archived in Design