Jonathan Avidan has announced RSS 3.0, a one-man attempt to fork RSS 2.0.
As far as I can tell, this is Avidan's first involvement in syndication. He's passing over three groups -- the developers of RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom -- without making an attempt to work with any of us.
RSS 3.0 is pitched as a better-specified version of RSS 2.0, but it drops a bunch of elements and makes changes to several others, so it's more than a spec rewrite.
Avidan also claims it will make Atom better, which would be a neat trick, since that format just became a proposed Internet standard after an arduous, two-year development process. I'm guessing that its creators would burst into tears at the slightest mention of a second version.
I don't know why RSS offers more forks than a picnic, but I wish I could use the RSS Advisory Board to simplify the situation. A new person trying to figure out syndication shouldn't have to learn three formats just to make an educated decision about which one to support. Correction: Four formats.
Slashdot founder Rob Malda thought RSS 3.0 was front-page news yesterday, which gives me hope. I've been working on an incredible new format I call HTML 5.0.