What is RSS? Is there a difference with ATOM?

If you are familiar with blogs, such as this one, you should be familiar with the ability to follow trends or updates using feeds. If you're not too familiar with this, perhaps you are more familiar with facebook when you comment on any item, any change in status or if another person comments on the same post, you will receive notification. This is basically what will happen when you follow an RSS feed.

With SharePoint 2013 and the use of MySites, this ability is expanded upon to allow you, as a user, to follow certain items as they become available throughout the workspace. This permits the tracking of certain documents and editting which may occur throughout the day. If you are using a publishing site, it would be easy to watch as certain documents are brought to your review, but if you are using a regular, non-publishing site then this may not happen the same way. In another case, you may not want to have to review items but would like to monitor them in general. In both cases, the use of the RSS feed would become beneficial.

RSS vs ATOM

These two options perform basically the same task with the goal of allowing users to keep up with the development of ideas and forums. RSS was the first to appear on a broad scale and took advantage of the early entry receiving popularity. It should be noted that ATOM is the more up-to-date and advanced system which is available, but I have not looked into the most recent changes to the programs. For general users, there won't be much of a difference, but professionals should be aware of the differences between the two and recognize that ATOM has been proposed as the IETF standard.

Important components of ATOM as opposed to RSS are as follows:

RSS 2.0 may contain either plain text or escaped HTML as a payload, with no way to indicate which of the two is provided. Atom, on the other hand, provides a mechanism to explicitly and unambiguously label the type of content being provided by the entry, and allows for a broad variety of payload types including plain text, escaped HTML, XHTML, XML, Base64-encoded binary, and references to external content such as documents, video, audio streams, and so forth.

The RSS 2.0 specification relies on the use of RFC 822 formatted timestamps to communicate information about when items in the feed were created and last updated. The Atom working group chose instead to use timestamps formatted according to the rules specified by RFC 3339

While the RSS vocabulary has a mechanism to indicate a human language for the feed, there is no way to specify a language for individual items or text elements. Atom, on the other hand, uses the standard xml:lang attribute to make it possible to specify a language context for every piece of human-readable content in the feed.
Atom also differs from RSS in that it supports the use of Internationalized Resource Identifiers, which allow links to resources and unique identifiers to contain characters outside the US ASCII character set.

The elements of the RSS vocabulary are not generally reusable in other XML vocabularies. The Atom syntax was specifically designed to allow elements to be reused outside the context of an Atom feed document. For instance, it is not uncommon to find atom:link elements being used within RSS 2.0 feeds.