[Update: I've got a proof of concept of this working, here's the post about it and a follow-up. Or, go directly to the proof of concept test page: http://feedtranslator.coreyhaines.com/feedtranslatortest.htm]

[Update: Doh! For some reason, my post on this topic got lost and the permalink pointed to my post about Google's answering of the "What is the matrix" question.  I guess I'll have to rewrite my RSS vs. Atom idea].

Scoble points to Evan William's blog and points out that Blogger now supports the Atom syndication format. He asks the question about why Atom instead of RSS. Going further, he, rather facetiously, I hope, asks whether Microsoft should create its own syndication format. :) Currently, MS is supporting RSS 2.0.

Personally, I think the whole RSS vs Atom debate is starting to sound like the HTML standardization debates between IE and Netscape supporters. People are talking about making a standard and having everyone support it, but we all know that human nature isn't like that. Everyone is going to make their own format. Here's my solution to the whole problem:

Create a web service that sits in a central location and is responsible for transforming between formats. If I use a reader that only reads RSS formats, and I want to read an Atom feed, I will point my reader to this web service instead of the Atom feed. The web service will be responsible for taking the URL, reading the feed, then transforming it into the requested format (in this case, RSS). Now, if someone much smarter than I am decides to come up with a totally ass-kicking new syndication format, a transform engine can be written between the new format and other ones. Now, if this web service also supports a rich API for plugging into it, also allowing the transform engine to be a web service, then the author of the format could simply write a transform web service and point the central service to it.

So, to summarize:

• People are selfish, standards fragment and split.
• We need to have a central place to transform between formats so that each individual blogging system can choose to support whatever format they want and not have to worry about supporting all of them.
• Web Service which controls transformations from one syndication format to another.
• Well-defined plugin API, so syndication authors (or others) can write transform engines between their format and others.
• Plugin API should support both component-based and webservice-based.

In one word, BabelFish.

[Update 2]

Dare Obasanjo has a take on this which I don't totally agree with. His idea tends toward moving from RSS 2.0 to a newer, standard syndication format. Again, I think that working on a global standard is only leading to more turf wars, rather than working towards working in our diverse world.

For all the web developers out there, wouldn't it have been great to have a service that would translate your web page to support netscape and ie and opera and all the others? Admittedly, HTML was a bit more complicated, especially when you started adding dynamic stuff with javascript. A syndication format, though, is definitely much simpler than a layout language, so I think this could be possible.