Nick Bradbury has written a good blog entry about the recent news coming through about adverts in RSS. I think we all saw this coming which is obvious by the lack of shock in the blogging community. The question is how to deal with the inevitable. I've already stated my view that if you post full-text feeds (so there is no need to come to your site) then its ok, but not with the short-text feeds. Shot-text feeds in themselves are just simple adverts for the user to come to your site.Dave Winer suggest "we could, by asking the people who create the software to add a feature that strips out all ads", as well as this being defaulted to 'On'.. Personally this is a great idea on the surface, but i cannot help but think its wrong. If you make money to support your free (to user) site from adverts why should you be punished? I think there should just be some guides set out clearly on how to advertise - in a nutshell something like:
No intrusive ads - seriously no one likes pop-ups
No advertising in short text feeds. If the user doesn't want to read your complete entry/thread they shouldn't have to read your adverts
Adverts cannot look like posts. This would trick the user into following links unwillingly
No more than 35% of a feed to be adverts. This mean that you can have one advert for every 3 entries