February 24th, 2005
Don’t Break My RSS!
So, two posts in the same day. I’m on a roll, dammit!
While I find it admirable that many bloggers are turning their blogs into for-profit ventures, it seems that the first thing to go are the standards once held so dear. Yesterday, RSS was the Holy Grail of information exchange, a platform for a grassroots revolution that promised to hose mass media down to its skivvies. Today, of course, there is money to be made, so f*ck RSS, let’s stick some ads in there!
The reason this bugs me is that there’s only one way to get an ad into an RSS feed, and that’s to surreptitiously embed it into an item’s description tag. This way, I can’t easily remove it and you’re more or less sure I’m going to have to see it (unless I have access to my reader’s code and a rudimentary understanding of regular expressions, of course). With such a simple action, the author creates a combative relationship with the reader. “Hey, jerk-wad, you’re gonna read this ad! You can’t avoid it! It’s all over the place. Bwah-Ha-Ha!”
It’s cruft, pure and simple. Boing Boing, popular champion of all things cyber, has attached little GIF text ads to their feeds. The ads are annoying and largely irrelevant (matching up advertiser and reader is still an inexact science, despite google). Boing Boing also prepended author names to their item descriptions, because, well, I think Joi Ito mentioned his reader didn’t support author tags. Total cruft! There are clear specifications for author tags. So those of us that with readers that can actually parse a feed correctly now have to see author names twice. Great. I can’t help but think that the Boingers enjoy the modicum of extra exposure.
I realize that RSS is especially vulnerable precisely because of its ease of use. But when our supposed champions go out and break it on purpose, for personal gain — well, I don’t see that road going anywhere good (tragedy of the commons, much?).