Atomic Confession
I confess: I always select the Atom protocol when forced to choose between feed formats, My reasoning for this decision rule is at best sophomoric.
Once you’ve seen one feed protocol (RDF, RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom) you’ve seen ‘em all. But… A-list blogger and software genius Dave Winer used to rant and rave about how the team who insisted on developing Atom as a feed syndication protocol had bad intentions. At the time, it sounded like this splintering of the RSS standard (never mind there were already several versions) might trigger the end of civilization as we know it.
That was then and this is now. Atom was developed, and found a home in the IETF. It joined the ranks of respectable feed formats. About the only visible advantage is that a page written using Atom will display in a reasonably intuitive way in your favorite browser, while the other formats look like what they are: a hodgepodge of XML markup, until you use them in a feed reader such as Bloglines.
My modest contribution to this inane teapot in a teapot: I always select Atom, just because. Please don’t tell Dave Winer, or he’ll never ever link to me from his (awesome) Scripting News.