Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Time for GOOG to give up on Atom?

A friend complained to me recently about how blogspot doesn’t have something quite as basic as category tags. Since that’s something I have thought of in the past as being a drawback of this platform, I figured it may be worth it to dig a little deeper. On the face of it, providing category tags seems like a simple enough feature. So why don’t they do it? The most obvious reason is the well documented fact that Google despite all the hoopla has done little outside its core area of search. However, I think this has more to do with their choice of syndication standard. Its been known for some time now that Google has chosen to promote Atom over RSS. In fact, each blogspot account comes with its own automatically generated Atom feed. A closer look at the specs reveals that RSS allows categories whereas Atom does not. Since category tags make little sense when used outside the context of a feed (which can then be mined for information by the likes of technorati). With the advent of the tagging revolution brought about by the del.icio.us/flickr gang, it seems like it makes little sense for Google to continue down this route. Maybe its time then, to give up on Atom? Or at least offer RSS as an alternative for blogspot users. Turns out that an RSS Feed is indeed available. Me ineptum. In any case, I will leave this post up for its conspiracy theoretic value :)

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home