Everyone who attended the Syndicate conference recieved a copy of the new RSS and Atom book by Ben Hammersley. The introduction gives us a short history of RSS and Atom, from HotSause to MCF, RDF and CDF. The story is really about XML, it's representation of metadata and the relationship between things.
XML has been kicking around for about ten years and it is only now that we are learning to organize our data and our lives with it.
Everyone who blogs knows about RSS, Atom is it's evolution;
Atom defines a feed format for representing and a protocol for
editing Web resources such as Weblogs, online journals, Wikis,
and similar content. The feed format enables syndication; that
is, provision of a channel of information by representing
multiple resources in a single document. The editing protocol
enables agents to interact with resources by nominating a way of
using existing Web standards in a pattern.
Atom Publishing Format and Protocol (atompub) Group has been striving for over a year now to come up with a consensus standard and they are just about there. Adoption is in all of our best interests, a format that will help organize our data, our lives.