Rodent Regatta

With all sincerity and out of total ignorance, I set the backdrop for a few questions by quoting Dave Winer:

”Candidate George Bush has a weblog.”

”The Bush RSS feeds are a total mess. At the Day 2 community session Joi Ito said the usual, ’we work together well in the weblog community.’ It’s not true. We work terribly together. I wish someone would explain to me why a user like the President of the United States has to have such a jumble of formats. Does anyone else care how hard it’s going to be to move this mess forward? (Impossible, actually.) I’ve really tried to get people to play together. Didn’t happen. At least we can be truthful about our failures, as it gets too late to fix them. I’m afraid, at the technology level, it’s business as usual, and not much win-win. Our shame. Blogger, Movable Type, I’ll take my share too. Maybe we can have a grown up conversation about this some time, and try to make the best of a very bad situation.”

I’m very interested in RSS feeds. I’d love to know why some RSS feeds display graphics in FeedDemon, but others do not. I’d like to know how to set up RSS feeds for categories. I’d like to know how to set up RSS feeds that show:

• the first part of an entry
• an excerpt of an entry which I think relates to Movable Type’s excerpt box below the text entry box
• entries with comments

In other words, I need to understand more about RSS. What I’m curious about from Dave’s entry is what makes the RSS feeds at George Bush’s weblog a ”mess?” Is it the fact that there are multiple RSS feeds? Is it the formatting of those feeds? I have no hidden agenda, nor do I have any viewpoint at all on the topic. I know there has been acrimonious debate about RSS feeds, but I don’t know what makes one a ”mess.” Anything anyone can point me to that explains the background of Dave’s statement would be greatly appreciated.