This morning while flying to work I listened to Tim Bray's ETech 2006 presentation on Atom. Very interesting! Tim outlines several known problems with RSS, and how Atom avoids them.

Phil Windley has written a short summary of the talk, but it's worth listening to, if only for the insights into how Atom came to life.

Atom is not just a feed format, and with the Atom Publishing Protocol it makes a very interesting API for content management and retrieval.