Atom & Privacy

I've been playing with the RSS/atom feeds and while I think they are pretty cool, I am also concerned with the privacy issue that Mark pointed out. All someone needs to do is go to the atom xml page for any blogspot hosted blog and most likely can see the original names that the posters created their blogs under. So much for anonymity ! I get the feeling some privacy laws may be violated here, but of course I'm no lawyer. In my case, I didn't even know that an atom feed was being generated for my blog, i think it was set up by default to be so. That is wrong. The default should be turned off and a copy of the fine print has to be presented to the users before they say OK to syndicating their site.

So, I played around with a couple of readers and by far the coolest is NewsGator. It integrates so seamlessly into Outlook, it's ridiculous. I've got Outlook bar shortcuts to all the blogs. I also use NetNewsWire for the Mac which is pretty cool also.