The NewsGator team are soliciting advice about [Advertising in RSS](http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog/archive.aspx? post=607).
Web pages have developed pop-ups, email has spam and now it seems RSS is to have advertisements. Pop-ups and spam are not opt-in services. In many cases they aren’t even opt-out. RSS at the moment has no mechanism to identify which posts are advertisements and which are not. It is opt-in, all-in.
If NewsGator leads the way in putting advertisements into RSS feeds then they are also beautifully positioned to make them an opt-in service from day 1. An extension to RSS that marks a post as advertisement means they can be easily filtered out. The other, more insidious, alternative is the change in policy. “By agreeing to take this feed you…”.
Many of the feeds I subscribe to are personal and so are unlikely to carry advertisements yet I’m still uncomfortable with the idea unless I am given a choice up front.
Yahoo! has been travelling around Victoria offering spam free email yet many of the messages I get from Yahoo! Groups contain advertisements. And all of them are irrelevant to me. I live in Australia. A mort rage plan for the U.S. just takes up bandwidth. Is NewsGator contributing to a problem it will have to solve as well? Perhaps if we get it right this time, the next new stream of communication will get it right as well.