Remember the good old days when spam told you it was spam with the “ADV:” prefix in the email subject?

I wonder if we’ll ever see the same from RSS. This news announcement probably escaped the attention of most yesterday, but is is another step in the evolution of widely-used syndicated feeds: VNU Embraces RSS

That would be VNU Business Media Europe, the global media & advertising giant. The announcement indicates they are partnering with FeedBurner to advertise in RSS about their publications.

Another significant announcement in the realm of syndicated advertising came last week when washingtonpost.com announced it would begin advertising in RSS.

I found especially unsettling this statement from the article: “As RSS gains ubiquity, we are hopeful that these early tests will lay the groundwork for advertisers and publishers to evolve the platform responsibly.”

So, advertisers and publishers have the job of evolving RSS for their own needs, eh? That’s an interesting perspective. I guess the 5 million+ bloggers and business-use feeds out there don’t need to worry about feed format any more. The advertisers will do that “responsibly” for us. Hm.

Advertisers, here’s a suggestion: Put in all the ads you want, just be sure to use the “adv:” namespace on all the tags you “evolve responsibly.” Our software will know, ahem, what to do with it.

More to the point, I bet we will soon start to see syndication readers that have ad-blocking software built right in.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 20th, 2005 at 09:27 and is filed under syndication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.