to my surprise i got feedback on that last post; to my greater surprise from someone who knows their stuff. the basic point was that RSS isn't a standard; while Atom is going to be ratified by the IETF.

i do not share blogger's optimism about Atom, any more than i think RSS is perfect (long way from it). basically what we get is the most virulent contender; and that's what we live with. some tech goes basically unopposed so we get a relatively stable technology (FTP basically hasn't changed in years, it just went GUI). on rare occasions a badly-abused standard will fight on to achieve a shaky version of stabilty - like (X)HTML.

then you get the hell of competing options; none of which will fucking die. like instant messaging - we have ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, AIM and - depending on whether you include this in the same category - IRC. although quite happy with ICQ; i had to sign up with the evil that is MSN, since i have a few friends who refuse to jump over to ICQ... because they have too many friends on MSN to switch.... and so it goes. so instead of being able to go with the majority of my friends on ICQ; i have the pain in the arse option of running multiple clients/systems. thankfully Trillian rescues me there; but not all situations have a solution like that.

[to be honest; billy connolly is about to grace my tv so i'm rushing this post out here.]

so, anyway, i'm going to enable the Atom feed: http://cheshrkat.blogspot.com/atom.xml. since i'm on blogspot and not a server of my own i can't actually track hits to the feed (at least ; so if you decide to use the feed please drop me an email (see the link at the top).

may the best feed win ;)

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