RSS and Atom are specifications that I use to produce blog feeds. They’re implementation decisions. The functionality that I’m offering is a feed, so when I talk to users I should call the functionality “feeds.” It seems so simple now.

Marc Hedlund broached this topic on O’Reilly Radar twice (first | second) without getting any agreement. It took a post from Evan Henshaw-Plath about the strength of podcasting as a name vs. RSS as a name to clear up the issue for me. From now on I resolve to only refer to RSS feeds as “feeds” unless I am talking about implementation issues.