<![CDATA[Dave Winer’s arguing that the question of ads in RSS feeds is boring and that the ads are annoying. He starts off saying the writer of Engadget is paid a lot of money—probably much further from the truth than Dave would like to believe; I can attest that blogging for the Red Herring doesn’t make me rich or even provide for much in the way of pizza and beer—so it sort of makes advertising inevitable. Still, Dave says, boring and annoying, so publishers of RSS feeds should “make your ads interesting so I don’t feel like I’m being programmed.”
Dave also falls for the rather trite argument that the RSS feed is an ad in itself if it is an abbreviated feed that pulls people to a site. That’s only partially true if you consider that most people skim newspapers and sites for articles they will read in their entirety and only a very small percentage of feeds results in click throughs. It’s a convenience, but not an ad. It keeps the pub in front of people who are interested in keeping abreast of, but not being deeply involved in the publication. In many ways, these feeds are just fodder for our discussions as bloggers, because most of us would not exist without something to talk about—original reporting is expensive.
Which brings us back to the question of ads in RSS. If reporting—or creating any kind of original content—is expensive, then there has to be an economic model to support it. Dinner doesn’t grow on trees, though a few courses of dinner might if you have time to do some farming. In a specialized society, in which we decidedly exist, money is how we exchange one form of expertise for another form of expertise or labor. We need to find ways to facilitate that exchange even for skimming, because skimming itself is a convenience.
Blogging doesn’t pay my bills, but if we are all capable of adding significant value to the economy through our writing or photography or videography or podcasting, it’s absurd to argue that advertising in and of itself is a bad thing. Bad advertising is a bad thing, but treating people well, as Dave puts it, doesn’t preclude placing advertising around the content people work hard to produce.
I’ve had to earn a living writing words rather than code, so this is clear to me. Code, in my opinion, is like advertising copy and bad novels—most of it is bad and the world would be no worse off without it. That said, great code is worth an incalculable amount, just like great writing, reporting and other forms of creativity. Lumping all advertising models for RSS into the “we’d do better without it” category is failing to acknowledge that the experiments to find valuable ways to support writers, editors, producers and talent are absolutely necessary to getting many folks out of the monolithic entities that control “content” today. So, Dave, tolerate what you find boring while we work out this question.
As Brent Simmons wrote today:
We’ve seen the success of syndication. Just about every weblog system creates RSS and/or Atom files which are readable in every aggregator. (Imagine if aggregators only worked with certain publishing systems!)
Doing the same thing for writing requires more than just agreeing on an API, it also means agreeing on the standard features of weblog systems and implementing them.
It boils down to the difficulty of user interface: it’s more difficult than the plumbing. Having to generate different interfaces for different systems should not be a permanent situation.
User interfaces cost money, in other words. And the more expensive it is to create the software infrastructure, the less of it there is.
When user interfaces and infrastructure are free, maybe we writers will work for free, too. But I doubt we’re going to get the oil executives, tomato farmers and pharmaceutical industries to buy into that idea, so, for now, I remain your humble capitalist.]]>