About Atom
Matt Webb describes why he likes atom, far too much stuff in there to summarize, just head over and read it yourself, it’s well worth it.
I didn’t pay much attention to atom in the past. Honestly i don’t know much about it other than that it can be used for syndication like rss. That’s also why i didn’t look into it before, rss always served me well. If there wasn’t this limit for descriptions to be no longer than 500 chars (if i didn’t completely misread the old 0.91 spec) rss 0.91 would still be my preferred choice for syndication feeds because it’s simple and beautiful. Given a data source and slight knowledge of any programming language to access this data, you can setup your own perfectly valid feed in less than an hour, even if you haven’t heard anything about rss before.
Matt Webbs post got me quite excited about atom, however. Perhaps it’s a mistake to get overly excited about something as heavily disputed as atom because of one single post on one single blog by one single author, but if his vision holds true, there’s plenty to be excited about in this atom thing.