Brojo's: a quick and easy way to add some nice web 2.0 touches to the site would be to have some of your dev guys add web slices to your front page. That way people can get the RSS type updates without you needing to add an atom to the site.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSlices
These can be set up for Firefox folks as well with the WebChunks add-on. Plus, adding this type of markup to the first page of the forums would be a nice idea (hint, hint).