At the Blogger’s BOF (”birds of a feather” or self-organized side-meeting) at Microsoft’s Professional Developer’s Conference (PDC), there was some discussion of XML, RSS, and Atom. Benjaminm reports, in his notes from the BOF that there is frustration with perceived drawbacks of the RSS 2.0 / XMLRPC approach to blogging and sydnication but also impatience with the community-driven nature of the Atom process:

Clemens concern is that there is a ‘comunity discussion’ that may go nowhere. We could either wait or we could define our own standard. DasBlog, .Text are the dominant engines, SharpReader, RSSBandit and Newsgator are the major readers. Perhaps a ’standard’ can be created rather than waiting. Scoble reminds us of Don Box’s comment that ‘the only spec that matters is a spec that is being used’. The mood is that Clemens and Scott should go away and work it out between themselves.

That’s all we need: a third, Microsoft-specific .NET-centric standard. w00t!