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Having watched RSS blossom from a bloggers' tool into a key component of rival browsers Firefox and Safari, Microsoft has embraced the technology, although its implentation will be known as Web Feeds.

With good reason claims MSN Spaces lead program manager Mike Torres in his blog, because Microsoft is adding additional functionality to the underlying RSS technology.

'Just because one team at Microsoft (in this case, the IE team) is grappling with the naming of a single feature in a single product (that does a lot more than just RSS), it doesn't automatically mean we are trying to "reinvent the technology",' he wrote.

Torres was responding to comments made by Dave Winer in Scripting News, a pioneer of RSS.

'Like it or not Microsoft, the technology is called RSS,' he wrote, adding to criticisms he had

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made of Google's use of RSS for its news service.

In a later posting he added: 'Now, there's no one to haul them into court for screwing with RSS, which is too bad, because they deserve to lose this case, but they will pay a price, because all their hard work in RSS will be for naught. How can you claim to support a feature when the name of the feature appears nowhere?'

However, Torres retorts, Microsoft is not alone. Firefox, to make the most pertinent comparison, calls RSS 'Live bookmarks' while Blogger mentions the technology only fleetingly in its FAQ.

'Looks like millions upon millions of people are using RSS, the technology, but not RSS, the brand,' Torres wrote. 'And this was long before IE7 "Web feeds".'

Whatever they are called, RSS feeds seem destined to play an ever greater part in the way that the Web is accessed. According to new figures from Nielssen//NetRatings, some 20 per cent of Web traffic is now blog-related and 11 per cent of blog readers rely on RSS to keep them up-to-date. There is nothing to suggest that the figures are going anyway but up.

'While RSS is an established technology, the growing popularity of blogs has catapulted RSS into the spotlight as a content personalisation tool,' said Jon Gibs, senior research manager.

However most Web users still have no idea what RSS is. Sixty-six per cent according to this survey and it could be argued that by rebranding the technology, the likes of (Firefox developer) Mozilla and Microsoft are potentially confusing surfers.