In reply to Marcus Herrmann.

Don't apologize for trying to get people to reach a consensus. Web standards can be an important and incredibly useful goal.

I also didn't want to rain on your parade. Perhaps the pattern is a useful one, but it tends to lend itself mostly towards developers. It's definitely a complex problem, particularly in a distributed and open web where we're generally fighting against closed corporate silos who only have to worry about what works for themselves (and not necessarily even their users).

Things get even more complex when you want to offer subsections of your content for people to subscribe to. What should I do to offer my photo feed to people who only want that and don't want the material in my math feed or my checkins for example? How can a publisher put out a massive firehose, and still give the subscriber lots of choice and flexibility? This is even worse when one's personal website has over 10,000 updates per year and over 7,000 various taxonomy terms, each with their own feeds (not to mention the potential combinations of these.)