Tim Bray just posted an entry about including a comment count in his atom feed. He said that he soon disabled it as people complained that it meant they saw the entry again as an updated entry. As I've recently done the same for my atom feed, I'm confused as to why this is happening. In my case I don't update either <published> or <updated>, just the <content> element. As the guid never changes, readers shouldn't consider it updated. Do readers really take a hash of the contents and consider it updated if it changes? Why do readers ignore the date fields. Is this affecting anyone? Certainly, it doesn't seem to affect Planet or the few readers I've tried it on.