Bloglines indexing half a billion RSS feeds posts

While I'm sure the intent of this piece is to say that Bloglines has 500 million *posts* in its database, the headline wound up as, 'Bloglines indexing half a billion RSS feeds.' To quote John Kerry, 'Would that it were!' :-)

And how many Atom feed posts is Bloglines indexing? I suspect that there is some sloppy terminology use here and RSS is being used as a synonym for any "web feed" even when the feed does *not* use the RSS XML format. How about some accuracy?

All of Google's Blogger feeds are in Atom format, *not* RSS, although bloggers sometimes redirect their feeds through feed filters such as FeedBurner to convert them to other web feed formats such as RSS.

Admittedly I may the last person in the known universe who insists on accurate terminology, but if mainstream journalists wish to continue to claim that accuracy is one of their hallmarks, at least they should disclose when they are knowingly being innacurate.

That said, I don't blame the journalists when in fact the source of the terminology problem is a serious lack of professionalism in the technical community.

BTW, I do use Bloglines (and Blogger). Actually, I use Bloglines and NewsGator in parallel since each has its own strengths. I don't use their "indexing" at all, but use Google to search for blog posts since most of the feeds are already indexed by Google.

-- Jack Krupansky