Deciding Which Feed Works Best for You

All three syndicationfeeds work with the major aggregators, and are usually supported by most tools. Not all, though. Google, which owns Blogger, a very popular hosted weblogging tool, supports Atom and RSS 1.0 but not RSS 2.0. WordPress, a very popular open source tool, provides files to create all three syndication feed types, but comes automatically enabled for RSS 2.0 and Atom, and not RSS 1.0.

Do you need all three types? No. In fact, to support three types of syndication feeds is to cause some confusion as to how many people are subscribed to you in some centralized tools. For instance, Bloglines will give a count of subscriptions for each feed, not each site. If you provide all three feeds, then the counts are split across feed type.

If you don't provide all three, then which you pick depends on your needs and what your tool supports. As mentioned, tools like Blogger support only a subset of the tools, and others may support only one. If you're planning on podcasting then you probably should look into supporting RSS 2.0 at least, primarily because this is currently the only version that Apple supports. However, you don't have to pick RSS 2.0 to take advantage of Microsoft's new changes because most of these are internal to tool use, and not necessarily syndication feed-specific. The one Microsoft tool that would be a syndication feed consumer, IE or Internet Explorer, should support all three types.

I personally have the capability of supporting all three types, but I only support RSS 1.0. The main reason for this is that I use RDF/XML for all my other applications, and I want to be consistent. And since I don't podcast, Apple iTunes needs are not an issue. I've not yet found an aggregation tool that can't work with RSS 1.0, and I've been using this syndication type primarily for well over a year.

Your mileage may vary, though. See what your tools support, chat with others, and assess your needs. You may find that providing all three feed types is your best option.