I like to use (for GNU date at least):
$ date -Iseconds
2011-11-21T10:56:17+0000
because it requires less typing. The ISO 8601 standard format.
-Is, -Im, -Ih, and -Id allow you to change the displayed resolution.
Bizarrely, this doesn't seem to be documented in my version of date (coreutils 8.10).