Hey, who knew — feedback works! This morning, CNET’s News.com published an article about a possible shift within Google to extending syndication support for users of Blogger to include RSS. It was generally a good piece, except for one glaring issue — a false premise that sat at its very beginning. As posted this morning, the second paragraph of the article started as follows:

In April, Google seemingly chose sides, dropping RSS support for new — but not old — subscribers of its Blogger publishing tool in favor of rival Atom.

In other words, the article laid the foundation as one where, rather than thinking about adding RSS to the options available to users, Google was thinking about adding back the ability to use RSS, as if Google had taken it away from the users at some point. (As is pretty well-known to most people involved in the world of syndication, though, prior to the support for Atom, non-paying users of Google’s Blogger tool never had any syndication options available to them.) The error didn’t sit well with me, so I decided to use those little mailto: links in the article’s byline and let the authors know that they were perpetuating a myth.

Imagine my surprise, then, when the authors personally acknowledged my feedback, and then changed the article! I received a polite email from Evan Hansen saying that they agreed that “drop” was too strong a term, and as of this afternoon, the same section of the second paragraph now reads:

In April, Google seemingly chose sides, bypassing RSS support for most subscribers of its Blogger publishing tool in favor of rival Atom.

There are a few people in the syndication community that wouldn’t mind a major media outlet promulgating the fiction of Google lashing out at RSS by dropping support for it, since it would have the potential to drum up a lot of sympathy. Alas, I’m not one of them, and CNet’s willingness to set the record straight without any muss or fuss pleases me, and makes me respect the company all the more for its efforts.