« June 12, 2003 | Main | June 14, 2003 »
June 13, 2003
RSS in Ads Revisited
Jenny disagrees with my comments on Ads in RSS. She says:
[I]f you are providing me with the full text of the article in my aggregator, then I'm willingÊ to trade you my eyeballs for an ad. However, if you're just sending me the headline with a one- or two-sentence description, then that's the ad. Your intent is to get me to go to your site to read the full article, at which point I will see the ad (probably lots of ads), and the transaction is complete - I clicked onto your page and became a number you can sell to your advertisers and in exchange you let me view the content.
I agree with Jenny in this distinction. Syndication implies you're giving me the thing, not just a link to it. What actually happening with most RSS feeds is we're pulling down a "teaser" and we'll go read the article on site if its interesting. In that case, the ads can exist on the site and when I read the article, I'll see them. Frankly I mostly only want to see summaries in RSS anyway.
Even so, if InfoWorld or the NY Times, or someone else wants to put ads in my RSS feed, I'll survive. If they're too obnoxious, I'll unsubscribe. I'm just not going to be able to get too worked up about this.
11:27 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Investigation Concludes
After my moment of stupidity last month, the state decided to have the Dept. of Public Safety conduct an investigation. They turned their results over to the AG's office which concluded that there was no "evidence that would merit criminal prosecution." There are some times when you're really glad to have someone else agree with you and this is one of them. The article in today's SL Tribune is pretty fair and factual.
The article states that I've agreed to pay restitution and that's something I'm happy to do. I think one could quibble with the amount. There's a claim that they spent 48 hours cleaning up after this and I'm very curious how all those hours were spent. Anyone who'd been on the other side of this knows that these numbers are always shaky at best. At any rate, its nice to have it concluded.