A Pet Peeve and More about RSS Ads
My pet peeve is any business (or person) who calls their audience (customers) thieves. Eggregious sinners in this respect: movie studios who run advertorials in theaters urging people not to copy movies (the viewers of this propoganda are people who paid for movie tickets).
What brings this pet peeve to mind is that Jason Calacanis, quoted in my Web entry yesterday as happy to be able to put Google contextual ads in his syndication feed, wrote "it also means is that people who have been stealing our content are now going to be stealing it with advertisements in it..." In other words, his audience (customers) are thieves. Jason, get a life!
Yesterday's suggestion that ads in RSS and Atom feeds got a fair amount of flak when I posted the entry in my O'Reilly blog as my O'Reilly weblogs seem to (are there hordes of people reading ORA looking for something to disagree with?) This well-reasoned side email gives the gist of the disagreement with me over the ads-in-syndication issue:
"Why are RSS ads any different than other ads?
"I took a survey a little while ago on my site and found that people overwhelmingly wanted full text feeds. I could do that, and do, but the lack of ads means I have 0 chance of any revenue from these visitors?
"So either a) eat any potential compensation or b) remove full text feeds and give just partial feeds.
"Now there's a "C"
"Why is this bad and in need of filtering?"
There's some logic here. If one publishes a valuable feed, it is natural to want to make money off it. I agree that feeds that only publish headlines with links are irritating (although sometimes they have utility as a quick way to browse things). I somewhat disagree about the need to publish full excerpts because a partial excerpt can give enough information so a subscriber can see if they want to link to the full content. I also think that even a full item entry can inspire readers to link to the content behind the entry, to get context, related items, discussion, and more.
Apart from the wish to make money from one's content (which is natural), the reason I think that RSS ads are different from other ads (the question posed above) is because RSS and Atom feeds are XML marked with the function of the elements, not with formatting. This is part of what gives syndication its power: knowing only what kind of thing an element of a feed is, subscribers are free to render (or use software that renders) feeds in anyway that seems good to them. The Google contextual ads violate this by placing content (their ads) within HTML table tags (along with other formatting).
If ads within syndication feeds were displayed within their own <ad>... </ad> XML tags, I'd have no problem with their inclusion in RSS and Atom: and subscribers and subscriber software could decide how to handle them.
Posted by Harold Davis at May 1, 2005 09:21 AM
