I’ve praised the RSS for a long time now, but I haven’t said anything about Atom along the road. In fact, I used RSS collectively to speak about both RSS and Atom. That’s not very right and here I am, correcting myself.
I was always aware that Atom and RSS are different. I knew that both of these formats were used for feeding information off the websites, but I never took the time to learn the precise differences. When subscribing to a feed, if the choice was given, I always selected RSS over Atom. I’ve heard several times that I should do otherwise, but no suffecient argumentation was given, so I continued as is.
Finally, this post at Slashdot linked to this wiki page that clearly explain the differences and why everyone should select Atom 1.0 feeds over RSS 2.0.
If you intend to use the web for at least the next few years, then take the time and read it!