Derrick Strumpf sent me a note about an article on Google and RSS. If you haven't followed this, Google owns Blogger. Blogger, at one point, supported RSS, albeit only for their paying subscribers. In April, Google dropped support for RSS in favor of Atom. Now it seems that maybe they're reconsidering:

According to an internal Google e-mail seen by CNET News.com, the company has been considering the change and last month assigned at least one staffer to write a memo summarizing technical details relating to RSS. The request came amid a broader discussion touching on extending RSS support for new Blogger subscribers and Google Groups, which supports Atom but not RSS in a test version of the service.

"I did ask (a Google product manager) to develop a summary...about RSS feeds, including the ways they are produced and consumed, which platforms/devices they run on, and information on the various formats (RSS 1.0, 2.0, Atom)," Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's vice president of product management, wrote on May 22. The message was part of a thread addressed to Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, CEO Eric Schmidt and others.

As of June 4, it appeared no decision had yet been made on the issue. A Google representative declined to comment.

From Google mulls RSS support
Referenced Thu Jun 10 2004 06:02:53 GMT-0600

Google's decision, of course, carries huge weight in the standards space, since Google's support for Atom counter-balances, in some respects, the dominance of RSS and gives it momentum. A neutral Google would make Atom suddenly less compelling to many people, such as the software developers working on feed readers.

Personally, I've not really taken sides in this debate, although I have to admit that I've been impressed with the design of Atom. I used the API in my class yesterday as an example of a RESTian Web service.