I just saw something weird in my website's blog folder and wondered if anyone else has experienced the same thing...

Blogger seem to have created an RSS feed for my blog as well as an Atom feed. I've got "atom.xml" as my "Site Feed Filename" (under Settings > Site Feed in the dashboard) but they've now created an RSS feed called "rss.xml" in the same folder.

Atom: http://ruscoe.net/blog/atom.xml
RSS: http://ruscoe.net/blog/rss.xml

What's more strange is that they've done the same for my mate – except he'd opted to call his Atom feed rss.xml (for some reason) so that's now been overwritten with an RSS feed.

RSS isn't something they've been offering for some time now – I think it used to be available to Pro users, but I'm not 100% certain of that. In fact, they recommend FeedBurner if you want an RSS feed rather than an Atom feed (see the bottom of this help item):

http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=698

Has anyone else got this with their blog? A quick check on a few Blogger powered blogs I know seem to confirm this is happening for others too – incl. the Official Google Blog:

Atom: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml
RSS: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/rss.xml

Is this news or have I missed an announcement somewhere? Are Blogger rolling out RSS feeds or has someone there made a mistake? Does anyone really care whether they have an RSS or Atom feed?

P.S. Don't you think it's a bit weird that its namespace is:
xmlns:openSearch="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearchrss/1.0/"

Are Google trying to get back into bed with http://A9.com again after they recently switch to a Windows Live powered search?

Yes, RSS was available to pro users. I used it for this blog. But it was exclusive, so you had to choose either Atom or RSS even as pro user...

they are pushing both format...RSS2.0 and Atom .now. However, their own Calendar RSS format is rss2.0 x version.. it does not support atom

Did Google give up on their almost religious support for Atom-only?

I chose RSS 2.0 after some thought. Can anyone explain me once again why is Atom better?

oh gosh Alex, don't even go there.. the Atom over RSS issues.

At one time Tim said that Atom is Cooked and ready for scaleable deployment. As such its moved into STD status under IETF.

However the industry along with the RSS Adv Group is moving ehance the RSS2.0.. if you are really interested in what happens . the RSS-DeV grooup is here..

http://rssboard.org/news/51/joint-proposal-request-rss-mime-type
http://groups.yahoo.com/messages/rss-dev

In short, ATOM is not Better or worse. However, with RSS the next wave of microformats aggreation is possible. But, with ATOM its not

I actually read many things about this war, but still couldn't figure out. Both formats work well for a simple blog feed. And I think it's fair enough to show only ONE feed.

yeah but if they only permit one feed, what happens to all your subscribers who ar taking the other ??

Will it not mangle or break the subscriber pattern ?/

Any serious RSS reader must support a large number of feed formats, including RSS2.0 and Atom. That's why it's enough to *just* publish RSS2.0 (or another format of choice). The people behind Atom wanted to replace the RSS jungle with a single strong tree, but in fact today that strong tree is firmly rooted in the big bad jungle that makes blog feeds such a pain (from a parser's/ developers point of view... I mean, it's not Really Simple Syndication). Atom is not a solution, it only added to the problem, IMO (tho it's not bad or anything on its own).