Gimmicks and Exploits
As the popularity of RSS and Atom grow, lots of people are standing around the water cooler trying to figure out ways to make money with them. The first and most obvious route is to put ads in your feeds, like Feedster, taking a risk you will alienate your audience. A more difficult route is to entice users to click through the feed into a site that can generate revenue. Woot.com’s feed, touting the tech toy special of the day, is a good example.
I have to admit, however, that there was a gimmick I hadn’t thought of: Sell space in your feed, character by character, asking buyers to help set a record for the most expensive RSS feed. Not for charity, not because anyone will want to read the “million dollar feed“, but just so you can “help make this site get into the record books.” Gosh, where do I sign away my paycheck?
So, I’ve decided to sell each character of this article, $1 at a time. If there are parts of it that you don’t like, simply pay me to remove them and replace them with your own advePlay LAN Panic!ment. Not because it makes any sense for your business, but because you can do your part to help make this article even more incomprehensible. Ah, sweet rewards.
On to more serious matters: Malicious RSS feeds. One of the more interesting, if less reliable, things you can do with RSS feeds is to populate them with DHTML and a little JavaScript here and there. Naturally this opens a whole new Pandora’s box for Feed Aggregators: Do you strip JavaScript and potentially cripple content, or do you allow it and potentially allow this kind of thing to happen?
