Mark Pilgrim presented an excellent overview of the fairly new blogging API known as atom at Apachecon on Monday. Created earlier this summer in a whirlwind of wiki activity (one that I hold up at work as an example of how much can be accomplished using wiki technology), atom’s modern, flexible approach to programmatically managing (creating, editing and deleting) online content like blogs is close to being adopted by the major blogging software vendors.
Mark’s presentation was educational, insightful and also somewhat humorous. If you know the recent history of various blogging APIs you probably joined in the laughter as various foibles of current solutions were explored. All the major blog related APIs were briefly reviewed and areas of weakness noted, which provided good contextual background for understanding atom as well as providing motivation for understanding the need for atom.