intertwingly

Carol Jones: Content syndication represents a radically simpler, more open way to deliver content and integrate applications. Today, most people know about RSS, which stands for Real Simple Syndication; it is used to push news and blog content out to feed readers. The advantage to users is that they can consolidate all the content they care about from whatever sources they like and view it all in one place. In technical terms, RSS 2.0 has some serious deficiencies if you want to do anything more than news. That’s why we advocate the use of Atom as a syndication format — it cleans up the bugs of RSS without losing the simplicity. There’s also an important spec called Atom Publishing Protocol (APP), which gives you a REST API to create, read, update and delete any kind of application data. At IBM we’re using Atom and Atom Publishing extensively as a public interface into many applications.  [via James Snell]

Also from James Snell: Flickr’s Atom feeds are using License links.  Note: Atom 1.0 is the default format for Flickr.  You can tell by dropping the &format=atom parameter.