Bink.nu has been RSS enabled for some time now, long time subscribers may have noticed that I changed the implementation of RSS over that period. The RSS feed changed from headline only, to full articles to partial articles back to headline only.

There have been complaints posted on the forum about these changes (to headline only). I choose the headline only for a reasonable reason. Now that reason is not changing, but the implementation is. Yesterday Google started testing adsense in to RSS feeds. Longhornblogs is the first blog to test this new implementation. Bink.nu will implement this new adsense feature as soon as it is available.

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Dave Winer writes:

"Advertising in RSS is just starting now, for all practical purposes. If we wanted to, as an industry, reject the idea, we could, by asking the people who create the software to add a feature that strips out all ads. Make it default to on. Then, that would force the advertisers, if they want to speak to us, to do so respectfully, by our choice. Create feeds of commercial information that we might be interested in, and if we are, we'll subscribe. If not, we won't."

Like many of us, I hate seeing advertisements everywhere I go. The problem isn't just that ads can be annoying: it's also that advertisers affect the content we see, and I don't wish to give them that power yet again.

So, the question is, should FeedDemon strip ads? I've wrestled with this quite a bit, and I've seriously considered making it possible to apply your own filters to what you see in FeedDemon, so that you could filter out ads by choice. These filters could be shared with other FeedDemon users, much like newspaper styles are - and hey, wouldn't it be nice if these filters could be used by any RSS aggregator, and not just FeedDemon?

But despite my personal dislike for some forms of advertising, in the end I've decided that FeedDemon should not strip ads, at least not by default. I don't wish to deprive income from those who rely on ad revenue - that in itself would shut out voices we might wish to hear. Plus, ads may give some people enough incentive to offer full-text feeds instead of excerpts, since a big reason people use excerpts is to drive traffic to their site where readers can view their ads. I'd prefer full-text feeds with ads over excerpts without them (and so would Richard MacManus).

I do understand what Dave Winer is saying - he wants advertisers to come to us with separate feeds that we choose to subscribe to because they offer useful, relevant information, and that's a nice idea (and I expect it will happen, too). But this doesn't necessarily translate into revenue for those who write blogs, which is why Google ads in feeds are so attractive. And there's nothing wrong with advertising in and of itself - it's simply that too may advertisers rely on being annoying and intrusive, and really, that's where we need to be vigilant.

The RSS ads I've seen so far are fairly tame and non-intrusive, but advertising is all about getting your attention, so we know where this is headed. Luckily, RSS readers like FeedDemon already strip much of the stuff that could be used for intrusive ads (popups, ActiveX, scripting, etc.), so really annoying ads aren't as likely to appear in your RSS reader as they are in your browser. And I guarantee you that every developer working on an RSS reader will be on the lookout for advertisers that discover exploits that enable them to intrude, and we will keep working to prevent that.

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There have been many discussions about RSS ads lately (including my own), but so far most of these debates haven't addressed ads in aggregated feeds.

Here's the deal: I believe that as more people rely on RSS for information, we'll see the problem of feed overload come to the forefront. The way this usually works is that you start using RSS like email, subscribing to a few feeds and reading everything that comes into your RSS reader. As time goes on and you continue subscribing to more feeds, you eventually reach the point where there's too much information coming in (and too little of it that really interests you).

While there's a lot that RSS readers can - and will - do to address this problem, I believe we'll also rely on human "editors" to find stuff for us. These are people like Scoble, who live in their aggregators and use their blogs to share the links that interest them. Rather than subscribe to a dozen feeds about a particular topic, we might subscribe to a single feed offered by someone who is an editor for that particular topic - for example, rather than subscribe to several PR feeds, we might just subscribe to Steve Rubel's feed and let him point out the interesting links. These editors are the ones poised to benefit the most from RSS ad revenue.

Combined with that, we'll also rely on RSS search engines like Feedster, BlogDigger, Technorati and PubSub to find items that interest us. Forget subscribing to a hundred feeds that might have an item of interest every now and then - just subscribe to an aggregated search feed which looks for your keywords.

Few of us would be willing to pay for RSS search results, so the RSS search engines will most likely rely heavily on ad revenue. This to me is where RSS ads get tricky, and it's something we should think about. If you use Google AdSense in your feed, what happens when items from your feed end up in the search results of an aggregate feed? Should your ads stay in place? Is it okay for the search engine to strip your ads and insert their own? How about if they insert their ads in addition to yours?

What if a search engine offers ad-free feeds for a nominal fee - is it ethical for them to make money by stripping out your source of revenue?

And if the search engines leave everyone's ads in place, how will the aggregated search feed look in your RSS reader if each item uses a different type of ad service? Will the hodgepodge of ad styles be so distracting that we'll find some other way to locate items of interest?

I'm sure others have thought about these issues far more than I have, so it will be interesting to see where this discussion leads us.

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