Blogging has gotten rave reviews as a new breakthrough in communication.  I like being able to subscribe to various author's thoughts as I imagine most of you do too.  However, there are a few things I find confusing or that I believe could work much better.

It's great that everyone has icons like this one  (or the one for RSS) on their site but can't they be taken to the next level?  Wouldn't it be nice if clicking on that image simply registered that feed into your reader of choice (assuming it supported the feed).  I remember clicking on the image the first few times thinking it would "subscribe" my reader only to be overwhelmed by a XML.  NewsGator doesn't a scary good job of kind of "knowing" what page you were looking at when you open Subscriptions | Add but I'd still rather subscribe directly from the blogger's blog.

What is the ATOM vs. RSS debate is about?  Does it address the issue in my previous paragraph?  I've tried to find a good summary of the differences but it reminds me of reading comparisons between .NET and J2EE .  There's too much passion around the topic and I can't find a neutral take on the differences.  In the mean time, every reader that doesn't want to go the way of Lotus' cc:Mail's VIM has to support both.

Every once and a while my blog reader (NewsGator) suddenly receives lots of unread copies of the same previously read post.  I'm not quite sure why it happens.  I realize (through my feeble own attempts to edit something I've posted) that making a change sends a new message/post to everyone's reader.  In the case below I highly doubt Robert did this for every blog he'd previously written. The other thing that happens is that a blogger will change an attribute such as his or her name and in the case of NewsGator there's a new folder for each new user name.  Take a look at the screen shot below of the redundant posts from Robert Scobel's blog.  

I'm only getting partial from some users.  I subscribe to Chris Sells' blog and for a couple of the posts I only get a description of the content ("The one where I spend a peaceful Saturday morning contemplating my life's possessions.") versus the entire blog.  For the most part I get all of Chris' blogs but how do I insure I get all of the text from each of the blogs?

I wish I could fix or contribute to fixing the perceived issues myself--you are coding codes and I'm only as good as your last rev of software.  However, I love the power of software because it means blogging and subscriptions can go follow the same functionality path like Windows did between version 1.0 and XP (and then to Longhorn.  Aaah...I see a bright light at the end of the tunnel now.  

Is blogging like any new technology?  Is it so new and exciting that no one wants to say a bad word about it?   I was reading a back issue of InfoWorld where the reviewer gave Red Hat Advanced Server 3.0 a "Very Good" rating even though 1) an upgrade from AS 2.1 is not supported and 2) the reviewer found bugs that he had to get download and recompile in order to fix.  From what I can gather 2.1 was the previous version.  A score of 8.2 seems suspiciously high given that an upgrade from the previous version isn't supported.  If we did that we'd be crucified (and rightly so). 

Please don't oust me from the blogging community for asking where the emperor's pants are. <g>