Aaron Roller of Motionbased (a cool subsidiary of Garmin) has written a very good, critical post on GeoRSS. They have just added GeoRSS feeds to Motionbased, which is great, but he has found the variations of GeoRSS confusing and frustrating. He illustrates the point with an example RSS item containing four different GeoRSS Point flavors — Simple, GML, W3C “formal” (contained with a <geo:Point>) and “casual”.

This is the most common complaint with GeoRSS, both from developers working with the format and even the wide group of people who have developed it. The last thing we want is to fracture GeoRSS in the same the RSS has been.

There are two main points I think GeoRSS.org needs to get across. First, publishers should not carry the burden of publishing in all the various flavors. Pick either Simple or GML, whatever is more appropriate for your application, and stick with that. Consumer and aggregators will be able to handle what you throw at them. Second, the W3C is aiming to resolve the differences with GeoRSS and the Geo Vocabulary with the Geospatial Incubator Group. This work should provide more clarity to the web at large.

Aaron also mentions “people at Where 2.0 were harrassing Google as if they are some sort of monster sticking to a proprietary format”. That’s me :). Well I will definitely admit to some pokes and prods (like MGeoRSS, which I’ve just updated to support GeoRSS Simple Points), but with good intentions. I believe Google has everything to gain by supporting GeoRSS as Yahoo, Microsoft, ESRI, Garmin (through MotionBased), and myriads of others, are making moves to do. KML is great, but I think GeoRSS fits a different need, and really does excel through open development.