Blogging Roller

Adrian Sutton: Issues With Ads In RSS: "So now there’s adsense for RSS feeds (or at least an early beta of such). It raises some interesting issues. I hate ads so I’ll quite happily unsubscribe from any feed that has ads in it, but what about the various planets that I subscribe to? What if one person who’s syndicated through those planets adds advertising to their RSS feeds, would I unsubscribe from the whole planet? Possibly. What if a few people did? Probably.

What is a fair policy for planet administrators to take on this? Is it okay for them to remove the ads from the feeds so as not to annoy their readers? Should they drop feeds that contain ads? Should they offer two feeds, one that includes the people with ads and one that doesn’t?"

That's a good point. What is a planet adminstrator to do when the blogs he aggregates start including advertisements in the body of their feeds? The PlanetRoller sites I've set up show only short excerpts of each blog entry and HTML is stripped, so this should not be a problem. When the ads start showing up as separate entries, then I'll be looking for ways to filter them out.

Dare Obasanjo: What I find very interesting is using RSS is the data access format for the Web. RSS gained popularity as a way to syndicate blog posts and news sites but its turned out to be a lot more versatile than that. Sites like Feedster and Amazon's OpenSearch technology show you can use RSS as a mechanism for providing search results and integrating search engines respectively. Podcasting shows you can use RSS to syndicate digital media content instead of just plain old text or HTML. With Amazon's syndicated feeds one can keep abreast of when new CDs, books and more are released.

As Pat likes to say: blogs are just the tip of the syndication iceberg.

Nice overview of business blogging by NC blogger Ed Cone in CIO Insight.