Does Atom in fact, have a branding problem? From what I am reading here, it would certainly appear so.

I get feedback from CodeZoo users surprisingly often that looks like this:

Could you please add RSS feeds for your news postings? It would also be great to have a feed of new components added, and maybe a feed for every component. Thanks.

Why, sure, I respond. No problem. In fact, they’re already there — every one of those feeds is already on the site. The thing is, see, we used an icon that reads “Atom Feed” to mark them, and apparently lots of O’Reilly-site-reading Java-programming feedback-sending feed-requesters don’t know what an Atom feed is. And who can blame them?

I mean really. If you went around the web collecting up all the little icons people use to represent an RSS feed of some sort, you could probably find well over a hundred of them. Most sites that support RSS (including this one) seem to feel that they need to support a bunch of varieties of RSS (0.91, 1.0, 2.0, Atom….) even though nearly every feed reader supports every one of those formats. Even the link I provided above to what seems to be the definitive Atom site (#2 in the Google search results for the term Atom, after AtomFilms) doesn’t use the term RSS anywhere on the home page, despite the fact that most people who have heard of syndication formats know what RSS is and don’t know what Atom is. (Would it be so hard, folks, to say, “Atom is an improved type of RSS feed,” somewhere on the home page — like at the top?) [Read the rest]