Should I subscribe to RSS or Atom feeds?

Question

With a lot of blogs I can either subsribe to an RSS 2.0 or an Atom 1.0 feed.

What is the difference between these two and which one should I chose to subscribe to a blog (I'm using google reader if that matters)? Why do bloggers even offer two different feeds if there's no difference to the end-user?

Answer 1

The differences are mainly technical. You can look them up here if you like. However, you can expect the discussion to favour Atom a bit since it's from their site.

Of a lot more interest is the reason why Atom was created:

Before the creation of Atom the primary method of web content syndication was the RSS family of formats.

Members of the community who felt there were significant deficiencies with this family of formats were unable to make changes directly to RSS 2.0 because the official specification document stated that it was purposely frozen to ensure its stability

Answer 2

They are very similar formats and in reality, it doesn't really matter which you use because google reader supports both anyway.

Although technically (as described by nagul), atom is a replacement for rss 2.0 and is theoretically better, in practice, you aren't going to see much difference.

Answer 3

Personally, I subscribe to the RSS feed. That way if they send down an audio or video file down the feed, I can easily bring it into my podcatcher.