The AtomOwl [1] group has been working on backward engineering the semantics behind the Atom XML format. It seems to be stabilizing quite well, and is even finding useful applications as a language to SPARQL enable atom servers.
I started looking at the blogging world a couple of years ago only, late in the game, which is probably why I have had the patience to look at the arguments with a fresh eye. I worked on the Atom group, because I thought that if something like this got started it was probably because they wanted to go beyond what had been done in the past. For a long time I thought that Atom could be like RSS1.x: an rdf and an xml format. But that was not to be. All this to say that I did not really choose a camp. I just fell into one.
Now that we have an Ontology for Atom it should be really easy to work out what the similarities and the differences are, since we have 2 rdf vocabularies to work from. I thought the comparison could be quite instructive. Perhaps AtomOwl will just have a really simple mapping to RSS1.1? Perhaps Atom has introduced some new concepts that would not be so easy to backport to RSS1.x? I really don't know. But it may be instructive to find out.
