Nick Bradbury: I keep running across sites that offer the same exact content as an RSS feed and an Atom feed. What's the point of this?
http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2006/05/pick_a_format_a.html
Randy: I have to completely agree with Nick. Don't publish multiple feeds. Remember that most of your readers likely don't know the difference between RSS and spaghetti. Presenting your readers with options is confusing at best.
Let me add, don't use a deprecated version of RSS. If you are using anything other than RSS 2.0 or Atom 1.0, then you're likely losing readers. Most RSS readers now support both of these formats better than all others. I'll add that RSS 2.0 tends to be better supported than Atom 1.0, but Atom is catching up. For podcasting RSS 2.0 is likely your only choice. Some blog hosting services, like Google's Blogspot, are still using Atom 0.3. That's simply too bad, because newer RSS readers aren't going to support the cooler features of a deprecated version of RSS. And Typepad is still defaulting to RSS 1.0. Even worse, I still run across an occasional RSS 0.9x. Yikes! If you're interested in acquiring subscribers, then give them one RSS feed, a good one, like RSS 2.0 or Atom 1.0.
