As mentioned previously, Bloglines now supports Atom feeds. Right. So what does that mean? Well, today it means that any site out there publishing an Atom feed can be viewed using the Bloglines aggregator. Of course, you’ll have to find a list of sites with Atom feeds. There are probably two kinds of feeds. The ones that people created (probably by hand) to test Atom at the time, and the ones that are created by software people wrote at the time. Hopefully people who went the software route have kept up-to-date with the changes to Atom. (I’ve tried to…)
Now most, if not all, of these sites probably also offer some flavor of RSS feed as well. So the real question is, what do you gain from using the Atom feed? Well, today I don’t know if you gain much, besides flashing your geek cred and showing the aggregator makers that supporting Atom is something people want.
Ok, that’s not completely true. So far from what I’ve seen it depends upon what’s in the feeds. For instance, Mark Pilgrim has minimal data in his RSS 2.0 feed, but more extensive data in his Atom feed. My RSS 2.0 feed and Atom feed are nearly identical, both using pretty much everything I could get out of my current publishing system, which admittedly is not a lot…
So where does that lead us to in the future? Heck if I know… My hope is that aggregators that support Atom do something interesting with it. In reality it shouldn’t be a big deal to support Atom, but I think it could be a big deal to showcase Atom. Are there things we can get from Atom that we can’t get with RSS? If so, let’s see it!
Either way, it sure is interesting to watch…