Dave Winer has posted a comment by Jason Calacanis about adverts in RSS feeds. In a nutshell, Dave doesn’t want ads in RSS feeds and Jason does. I found this comment from Dave to be very curious:
“BTW, what exactly is wrong with the way the BBC and NY Times do it? They write good one or two sentence summaries and link to the full story from the feed, and the ad is there, not in the feed. Jason, think about it — RSS itself is an advertising medium, if you use it correctly.”
Now I’m a big admirer of Dave Winer, even though he’s frequently controversial and a lot of people dis him. He’s done great things for RSS and he deserves a lot of respect and kudos for that, so I’ll always try to stick up for him. But in this case I have to take issue with his stance on ads in RSS feeds. (btw I have been posting about this issue all week on Silicon Valley Watcher).
I left the following comment on Dave’s RSS-focused blog and I want to repeat it here. It’s my reply to Dave and all the other people up in arms over ads in RSS feeds…
Richard’s 2 Cents
I can’t quite believe what I’m reading: you prefer excerpted RSS feeds to full-content?? Obviously this means you don’t think RSS is a first-class content citizen, as HTML is – why else would anyone not put their full content into an RSS feed?
So you’ve pretty much answered the first 2 of the 3 questions I posted in response to your last post. But what I want to know is your answer to the third… 😉 (and I don’t want to hear the ‘I’ll pay you by donation’ argument from people, because clearly that doesn’t scale unless you’re Jason Kottke).
1) Which is better: an excerpted RSS feed (where you have to click through to read the whole post), or a full-text RSS feed with some ads?
Personally I’d prefer the latter.
2) Really, what *is* the difference between advertising in an RSS feed and advertising on a webpage? RSS is becoming the new HTML – why fight it?
3) What’s wrong with Writers wanting to get paid for their work (just as software developers want to get paid for their work)?
