phil wilson :: a geek commodity

5:37 PM

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Wednesday, March 10, 2004

Dave Winer wants to merge RSS and Atom

Well, OK, that’s not strictly the gist of his post, but it’s a good attention-grabber isnn’t it? :)

The interesting thing to note is that it went up almost two full days ago and only has 46 comments (that are still there – there may have been a load of posts deleted of course).

Has it just not got the blogging press that this kind of thing would have garnered 18 months ago, or do people just not care any more? There are so many tools and libraries that for producers it’s become almost entirely trivial to provide multiple versions of RSS as well as an Atom feed.

Consumers just don’t care about the format as any aggregator worth its salt will be able to read any kind of feed. Will Atom just forever be the scorned younger brother of web syndication? Will Atom rise up by virtue of its syndication capabilities and overthrow the RSS incumbent?

Hands up if you care any more.