.Avery Blog

My gut reaction is to believe that the reaction from the community is going to be negative.

Blogs in general are seen as the voice of individuals rather than a business and I think anyone trying to insert ads into an RSS feed will get the same type of reaction that the initial banner ads produced.

Does not mean that someone won't try.. :-)

But there are other options for sites.. For example, at LearnMobile.net, I provide an RSS feed. That feed provides the Title of the news/article item AND a short description of the item. BUT NOT the content of the Item. My articles are usually long enough that it really does not make sense.

Generalizing this, if the interest of the person is peaked by the Title and the description, they can come to the site to get the full effect at which time they could theoratically get exposed to ads (NOTE: Ads are not part my business model, so you won't find any ads at my site :-) )

- Anil

I can see how it could be negative, I just don't understand why some people have such an aversion to advertising. As long as it is not annoying then I have no problem with banner ads, text appended to an email, or ads in a newsletter. I understand that it costs money to run these services, and the people running deserve to at least break even.

The Teaser approach does seem like a better idea, at least to get more users to go to the web site instead of just reading the RSS.

RSS Feed Advertising : ScottW's ASP.NET WebLog

I find quite a few sites (CNET for example) just show the intro and then of course if you want the whole piece you can go to the site and get hit by the ads. I find that works pretty well, although sometimes it's a little confusing being able to tell whether a blog entry is just very short, or whether it carries on at the main web site. i.e. What does the link at the end of the entry do? Does it take you to a full article, or does it just show you what you already read in the aggregator? I think there's also something to be said for ScottW's comments about not managing everthing with an aggregator - if you do that then the community element isn't as strong.

For mine at least the link Element which resolves as the href for the Title takes you directly to the Content Body.

I definitely would NOT want it to take you to the description element that you already read. That would be just plain annoying!

From what I've read about the RSS 2.0 Specs the description is meant to be just that, a short description of the blog item. Although most Blogging Tools use it to to store the entire Blog Item.

In fact, the RSS 2.0 is extensible in that you can add a

<rss version="2.0" xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/">

to the rss declaration and add a <content:encoded> section which can actually contain the full content. This way you can seperate out the description and the content.

For mine at least the link Element which resolves as the href for the Title takes you directly to the Content Body.

I definitely would NOT want it to take you to the description element that you already read. That would be just plain annoying!

From what I've read about the RSS 2.0 Specs the description is meant to be just that, a short description of the blog item. Although most Blogging Tools use it to to store the entire Blog Item.

In fact, the RSS 2.0 is extensible in that you can add a

<rss version="2.0" xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/">

to the rss declaration and add a <content:encoded> section which can actually contain the full content. This way you can seperate out the description and the content.