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May 02, 2005  The Syndication Mess

In general, I try to keep expletives out of my posts, but this one will be an exception. Tempers have run high. You've been warned.

Recent news about Google's new test feature to place ads in RSS feeds have caused a bit of a backlash.

Dave Winer commented: "... It wasn't just that they had failed to recognize RSS, they also tried to delete it. You know the mutant solidiers [sic] in Lord of the Rings, the ones the Fellowship keeps killing? That's Google. They do everything mean and evil, and in the end we'll kick their asses back to Podunk. Seems Silicon Valley can't resist fucking with a good thing. They won, they had us, and then they insist on taking the low road when taking the high one would cost them nothing. Fuckers."

These are strong words. Who's Dave Winer, what's RSS, what has Google done wrong, and what's the solution to this problem?

Who's Dave Winer? What's RSS?

What is RSS? It's a syndication format. It's a way to get web content. For example, the posts on my website are syndicated using RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom. If you use Bloglines, Firefox, Safari RSS or other software that reads RSS or Atom feeds, you can subscribe to my feed, and when new information is available it will show up automatically.

Syndication is relatively new, so many people haven't taken advantage of it (there's no support for it in Internet Explorer which is what most people use to browse the web) but it's catching on. In fact, in his recent interview, Jim Allchin, head of the Windows project at Microsoft, said that syndication and subscriptions represent the third big movement for getting information on the web (the first was hyperlinking and the second was search).

The thing with RSS, though, is that it's not a single format. It is an umbrella term that describes seven different formats. The original (RSS 0.90) was developed at Netscape.Dave Winer It was dropped in favor of an updated format, 0.91, but that too was sadly dropped by Netscape. Dave Winer (here's where he comes in) picked up 0.91 and built a company called UserLand around the idea of RSS. Although a separate group picked up RSS 0.90 and updated it to RSS 1.0, Dave Winer and company used the 0.91 branch and moved it to RSS 2.0. Whew...

Google has had a rocky history with syndicating web content. Instead of going with RSS, it chose to use Atom for its popular Blogger blogging software. What's Atom? Well, Atom is a parallel format to RSS. Google and IBM weren't satisfied with any of the seven versions of RSS, nor the control Dave Winer and company had over the development and future directions of RSS 2.0. So they made a competing format.

Now you know why Dave Winer is so pissed off.

Yet, he seems to be one of the most sensible people in this entire fiasco. He recently proposed a merger with the newer Atom standard, insisting "it's time to bury the hatchet and move on."

What has Google done wrong?

Fragmenting the syndication space by introducing a new format ruffled some feathers, but people will survive. Photoshop can read and write dozens of competing image formats and, quite frankly, no one's life is ruined because there is no single image format that everyone must agree to use. So Dave Winer needs to just get over it.

Chris Pirillo puts it more bluntly: "Atom. RSS. Implement either one you want, or both. Aggregate either one you want, or both. Just STFU already so we can get on with more important things - like getting people to understand the simple power of desktop syndication. Or, ya know... keep trying to prove to the world which side has the bigger (collective) dick."

The recent issue with Google is that they have started allowing people to stick ads in RSS feeds. Doesn't sound like a big deal, right? As Brad Feld noted, "This has been long anticipated, is a completely logical extension of Google AdSense, and - while some people may fight ads in RSS – it’s an inevitable part of the RSS ecosystem. "

Particularly for Google, a company who bases 96% of revenue off of advertising and generates revenues from advertising that will eventually surpass that of primetime television, choosing to not stick ads in front of people would be newsworthy.

Although it hasn't been stated this way yet, I believe this is more about the way the ads are included than it is about the ads themselves. When Google initially placed ads along side of web searches it did so in a way that at the time was revolutionary: they were simple text-only ads, discretely placed on the other side of the page away from the data you were looking at (the search results). The point was to keep them subtle and separate. It was a homerun. People were tired of "shoot the monkey"-style, ugly, Flash-animation-banner-ad advertising. It was annoying, childish and needed to be eradicated. Thankfully Google was there to save us. Now they've given up, too. Pathetic.

Google RSS Ads

What kind of example is this for the Feedsters and the Feedburners of the world? Are they going to copy Google with fugly banner-ad style RSS ads of their own?

Especially for RSS, which is based on XML and tries to separate the presentation from the data, this is unacceptable. We've even got Dave Winer going off the deep end, looking for hacks to yank the ads out. "Advertising in RSS is just starting now, for all practical purposes. If we wanted to, as an industry, reject the idea, we could, by asking the people who create the software to add a feature that strips out all ads. Make it default to on. Then, that would force the advertisers, if they want to speak to us, to do so respectfully, by our choice. Create feeds of commercial information that we might be interested in, and if we are, we'll subscribe. If not, we won't."

How do we solve the problem?

Before she and I left her house, a girl I knew in high school told me she needed to put on some makeup. "You wear makeup?" I asked. "The right way to wear makeup is so that people can't tell you wear makeup," she told me.

Google needs to step back and realize that interruption marketing and in-your-face ugly banner-ad style attention-getters are so 1900s. The advertising of the future is so subtle, so elegant, so relevant, so contextual, that it's not advertising at all. It's informative.

Posted by johnnie at May 2, 2005 12:04 AM

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