I read an article about RSS and Atom yesterday at New Scientist. It struck me as not having been written by someone familiar with digests, but rather cobbled together from what knowledge and impressions they were able to glean from a few conversations with some key players (Dave Winer and Anil Dash are the two specifically mentioned). While it's not surprising that every news organization doesn't have an RSS expert on staff, it does give one pause to wonder how much misinformation is going to be circulated about digest formats, and what it will take to educate the masses accurately. The following is from the email I sent to New Scientist in response to the article:

The format chosen by Google could be highly influential when the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) decides which format to make a standard.

The IETF has been considering creating a working group for Atom for a while now. RSS has not been under serious consideration at all, as far as I know. Last week the IESG apparently approved the creation of an IETF working group for Atom (see http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/06/10/AtomIETFYes). An official announcement is expected soon--I'd imagine within a day or two. The word is that Dave Winer offered to take it to the W3C if Atom goes to the IETF (see http://blog.ziffdavis.com/gallagher/archive/2004/06/05/1208.aspx for the source information and http://www.geckotribe.com/ibl/b/2004/06/rss-at-w3c.php for commentary on it).

Atom also allows any comments that are posted to a blogging site by readers to be syndicated, unlike RSS, which only allows the blogs themselves to be sent out as alerts.

I don't know who made that claim, but there's nothing at all in either format to restrict whether comments could go into the feed or not.

But David Winer, at the Berkmann Center for Internet and Society in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who created RSS,

Winer was one of the creators of RSS, but not the sole creator.

... says that these features make syndication more complicated to implement.

An opposing point of view would have been useful. The looseness of the RSS specification makes it unnecessarily difficult to implement in some cases. The effort to create Atom grew out of the desire to rectify that problem. Atom could end up being more difficult, but my sense, as a participant on the Atom syntax email list is that there is enough opposition to unnecessary complexity that we'll be able to avoid it. (By the way, though I'm involved in creating Atom, my own company's products currently support only RSS--I'm not anti-RSS. I'll be supporting both formats in the near future.)

And the bigger companies behind Atom could start charging users to implement it for them, he says.

Huh? Is he suggesting that no one ever paid somebody to implement RSS support for them? There are no "companies behind Atom" in the sense of any company owning Atom, if that's what he meant. Atom is open, so no one will every be able to charge for the privilege of using it. I don't see how it's different from RSS in this respect.

Both formats are currently freely available.

This sentence implies that that might not always be true. I can't imagine how either could ever become less freely available than they are now, so I think this is a misleading statement.

Winer believes that the creation of Atom has generated unnecessary confusion. Now people need to download two types of feed reader to receive alerts and sites need to publish in both standards.

Untrue. Most feed readers support both versions, and Atom support is increasing, so two feed readers aren't needed, and publishing in both formats is not necessary. It certainly is an option for anyone who wants to (there may be advantages to either). And since publishing tools are generally going to support both, doing so won't impose any significant inconvenience on users.

He suggests that the two standards merge to form a single standard that could be approved by the IETF.

The history of RSS seems to me to suggest that by "merge", he basically means that the objectives that motivated the creation of Atom will be dropped, and RSS in it's current form, or perhaps slightly modified in ways that don't resolve the Atom community's concerns, will be the "merged" version. His reasons for not allowing the changes to RSS that the Atom community wants are legitimate, but not everyone shares his goals and priorities--thus the creation of a new format.

This suggestion of merging the two is old news, in internet time, and has been made obsolete by various events mentioned above.