About 2 weeks ago I started using feedburner for my main feed. It took a while to decide because I prefer being independent as far as possible but feedburner offers some interesting services like stats (currently 1! subscriber [me]) I wanted to try.

The actual feed page looks like this by default. This is the feed for the b-sides category, just as an example. For my main feed I chose a different style.
The default style looks much nicer but I decided against it, because it looks to much like a regular web page.
Today a friend emailed asking where he could find the link to the feed, pointing me to the feedburner address.
 

Well, this is the feed, it just doesn’t look like it. I think a lot of people who are not geeks just got used to the pattern “if I read XML and there is a lot of crazy code on the page, this is a feed”.

So if the audience of a blog consists of rather regular internet users, using a styled feed can really be a disadvantage.
Even if they are right on it, they might not identify it as a feed and might eventually not subscribe.