In Support of Syndication

The other day, Dave noticed that the RSS Feed at Evan’s site had stopped updating.

It occurred to me today that I hadn’t seen an update from Evan Williams in quite some time, so I went to his weblog to see if he had been udpating, and sure enough, he had. I guess they stopped maintaining his RSS feed. - Dave Winer

I actually knew about it because Steven Cohen had noticed the new support for Atom and then commented on what it meant.

A quick note about Blogger, ATOM, and RSS. It seems (and I could be wrong) that since I was a Blogger Pro user, I get a choice between using an RSS Feed or an ATOM feed. I can’t use both, it’s one or the other. It makes no difference to me, as long as my content can be syndicated. So, for the time being, my feed will remain the same (Yay!!), and if they pull the plug on RSS, I’ll let you know (yet another reason to subscribe to your own feed, I guess). - Steven Cohen

Of course, some people perceived a sinister intent.

For a company whose motto is don’t be evil, Google’s drop of RSS support is quite troubling. Atom is both an API and a format. I could understand a move to the Atom API. I could even understand a migration to the Atom format. But I just don’t understand the need to drop RSS support. Readers and aggregator developers are potential losers. But who are the potential winners? - Dwight Shih

I don’t quite see how they dropped RSS support, but then, I gave up on Blogger right around three years ago. It became just a bit too unreliable when there were alternative available. I didn’t feel betrayed, though, I just moved on.

The moral of the story? If you are looking to produce feeds in Atom, you should have an IETF standard by late this summer. If you are looking to produce feeds in RSS, you need only follow this advice.

Anyway, I’d say if you produce RSS like mine, you’re in good shape. - Dave Winer

Too bad that not everyone has as positive an outlook as Steven.

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In Support of Syndication

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