Hi folks. Heads up: some of us at W3C have floated a suggestion that
Atom standardization could happen at W3C. See articles from Danny Ayers
(http://dannyayers.com/archives/002600.html) and Mat May
(http://www.bestkungfu.com/archive/?id=475) for details. Eric Miller's
message is at http://www.imc.org/atom-syntax/mail-archive/msg03711.html

We are not being religious about Atom's non-RDFness, and are looking
into the options for a Working Group at W3C having greater than usual
public input.

My personal take (well, part of it). RSS1.0 pretty much does it for me,
format-wise. There are a few bugs to fix, but technically it does the
business. Service APIs are another matter, and Atom is making good
progress there. However much as I value RSS1 and the community here, it
has been clear for a while that much of the energy in this area has
transferred to the Atom initiative. I believe Atom has a lot to offer
the Web, that RDF and RSS1 has many things to offer Atom, and that much
could be achieved (eg. via
http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/NOTE-grddl-20040413/ or
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/2004/02/xhtml-rdf.html) by providing an RDF view
of Atom, and perhaps an XHTML encoding of the same data structure.

Regardless of which standards organization ends up hosting the Atom
work, I am certainly keen (as W3C's Semantic Web Interest Group chair) to put
renewed effort into continuing these discussions about how these
technologies fit together...

cheers,

Dan