Icons for RSS

[Felipe Ignacio Cañas Sabat]

I was doing some light hacking on a feed aggregator (Liferea), trying to
make some changes to the UI, when I ran into a couple of problems to do
with the freedesktop icon standard.

To mark feed items as "favorites" I use the standard icon
"emblem-favorite". I wanted to do something similar to mark feed items
as "new" (or "unread"), but there are no standard icons for this. I
found this strange because there are icons that specifically state
"unread mail" and such, but nothing for a general "unread" or "new"
item.

I couldn't find anything to do with this topic in the mailing list
archives. My question is if it has ever been discussed to have an icon
for a generic "new" or "unread" emblem.

Also, I'm wondering why there is support for something as specific as
e-mail, and not for instant messaging, RSS feeds, and such? Such
activities are now as common as managing e-mail, so it strikes me as odd
that they aren't considered in the standard. Has this ever been
discussed?

Regards,
-Felipe