I added the RSS1.0 feed Dan Brickley mentioned earlier [1] to JNN, my
news reader and it read it very well.
If you use Protégé it can read any OWL file and even create forms to
help people fill them out, even though it is only a machine, and has
nothing more to go on than a bunch of rules.
If people mix vocabularies that are not of interest to many people then
they will soon find out. The best vocabularies will win in a process
of natural selection. Atom gains by being able to work on the core of
what it is good at, without having to solve every other problem out
there too.
It does not matter if Atom does not use RDF in the end. It is easy to
do: so someone will. Atom itself evolves in a world of standards which
go though a process of natural selection.
The question was: what does atom bring to the table that RSS did not
(other than a better name of course)? If Atom wants to be something big
then it should work with the rest of the world, in a distributed
manner. Then it will leverage the best thinkers around the world.
Otherwise it is just a slightly better Arse feed. And though it might
be a standard on paper, people may well wonder what the big deal about
it was.