The Courtship of Atom
For those of you who aren't living this syndication stuff every day (and I hope you're not!), the story of Atom (a syndication format) has taken an interesting turn recently. There seems to be a serious possibility that the W3C might charter a Working Group to standardize Atom. The article referenced here talks a little bit about what some of the advantages and disadvantages might be if such a "marriage" were to take place.
A few words about the article. Just so you understand the author's biases, he's definitely in the RSS 1.0/RDF camp. I personally disagree with a few of his statements: I wouldn't call Atom "insanely successful" quite yet, even given the author's definition of success. I also wouldn't call RDF as an extension mechanism "infinitely preferable" to RSS 2.0's extension mechanism, as I've mentioned before. Tone down the hyperbole a little, please.
Those reservations aside, however, this is a good article to read to get a handle on what's going on in the Atom universe these days.