Roll your own or roll over

Feedburner is the converter of Atom to RSS feeds that Evan of Google's Blogger endorses. On their blog they talk about syndication myths. And take a look into the possible future of syndication feeds:
The good ...the entire syndication space will simultaneously witness a growing sophistication and accompanied level of fragmentation through conflicting namespaces and specialty clients.Perhaps niche consumer clients which read feeds for reviews or to connect schedules together or to join friends up or a host of other uses.

The bad ...some namespaces will be standardised for greater community flexibility, while other fragmented namespaces emerge in order to provide companies with competitive advantage.

Whatever format wins in the format war, we are certainly likely to find stuff in our feeds that we don't understand, nor will our techiest of techie friends. There will be encrypted tags perhaps for our credit cards, which will be fine and understandable. But, there will also be encrypted tags produced by our blogging software that say we're cheap skates because we use free blogging tools, or tags Disney add in to charge us for something, or charge the person pulling the aggregation together.

Our only recourse is to write our own feeds, which isn't realistic. Or, use a reliable and editable feed generator, like Radio Userland or MT, where we have complete control, should we want it, or a trustworthy online blog tool supplier. Either way RSS will be easier to understand and check out by humans. While Atom, provided through the corporate juggernaut of Blooger [sic] or the closed system and money hungry TypePad will be distressing for a mere mortal to read, and easily tainted by encrypted additional tags. Do we think these companies will be trustworthy?

1744 Also posted to: Home page . At: 12:24:16 PM  . .
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Other title(s) for this story: Who'll control your feed?   BigCos will control your feed