I noted this article about the same time I noticed some small squiggling that claimed to be an advertisement. My RSS feeds are brought to me via Sage 1.3 in conjunction with Mozilla Firefox 1.0.3; I wonder, is anyone else getting quirky ads like this?
=aron=

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I completely understand your situation and I think this is a great solution. At least you didn't place some massive banner at the TOP of the feed, FORCING us to scroll down past to get to the good stuff.

Thanks for a great site and network. I think most of your readers will understand the necessity to pay some bills. You gotta do what you gotta do.

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I'd like to see the number of comments made listed in the RSS feed.

Thanks!

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I would much rather have a google adsense advertisment in the RSS feed than having truncated posts. Keep up the great work!

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As long as it stays at the bottom of the entry body and does not sneak up floating to the right or between paragraphs, it seems fine. Obviously, it should not start blinking, embedding Flash or other devilry like that.

One more thing: It's an image! Why an image?

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Ha ha, Sage RSS reader for Firefox already has ad blocking... sort of. I see the tiny tiny Google ads too. Sage can't display them correctly for some reason but it doesn't bother me.

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"Weblogs, Inc. wants to continue providing TUAW full-post RSS feeds to you at no cost."

You act like an RSS feed - which comes pre-installed with the FREE blog software you're using and requires absolutely no work from you - is a privilege. It's not. Weblogs, Inc. is putting ads in their RSS feeds because they want to make more profits.

I don't mind if Weblogs, Inc. wants to make more profits, but at least be honest with us. Don't sit here and blow smoke up our asses.

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The blog you guys have here could be done with any free blog software out there (Wordpress, MovableType, etc). If you chose to develop your own, then any money you spent is your own fault.

I never said you guys were swindling us, I just felt the explanation was stated in corporate speak. The ads on RSS feeds will add to profits, and that's all I wanted mentioned. But you guys were pretending like you were doing us a favor. You're not. Go ahead and take away the RSS feed, and then watch all your visitors go away.

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C.K., Scott and I had a meeting last week about how badly we wanted to keep doing favors for paul but we decided against it :)

The ugly truth is that we're all greedy moguls who hope to finance new cars, large NYC apartments and tropical vacations off this gig and the lack of ads in the RSS feeds were getting in the way of that.

Anyone have a problem with that?

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Sorry, hate it. Unsubscribing from your RSS feed (unless I can get the fine folk at NewsGator to install a blocking script) and blogging about the commercial pollution of the RSS information space too. Very disappointing, Weblogs, Inc. Very disappointing.

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So I decided to give you all the benefit of the doubt and clicked on one of these ads, Safari launches and I get a web page that says "You must be running Internet Explorer to view this pages web content" popped up. I am still laughing. Don't think those ads are gonna do much good for Mac users...

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Dear paul and Dave Taylor, you are right. RSS is a right, not a privilege. Weblogs Inc owes you. So much. After all you have done for them. And ads just make the whole RSS completely unreadable. They should have asked you first, those selfish greedy bastards!. That's why you UNSUBSCRIBE. And you are right: everything should be free. Everything. Always.
Please email you address to Weblogs Inc and Laurie will bring you a beer every day and give you a massage while you read your RSS feeds...

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I'll ask again then: Why the Shell are those ads images?

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I agree this is a much better solution than truncating posts... But I would guess that a lot of RSS readers might ignore the javascript?

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Your main site has google ads on the sidebar, with an ad strewn in every few posts. Something I can manage. Look at your site in Safari RSS.

Unsubscribed.

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I onlyn hope you don't do a boing boing on us and fill your page with ads, also those web ads popping up in your rss reader can be quite amusing as the ones that pop up in Boing Boings news feed are usually way off mark, never click on them anyway.

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Ads placed in an RSS feed are counter to the philosophy and raison d'etre of RSS. The subsrciber of the site's RSS feed will eventually see ads... if the summarized articles are of interest to the reader they'll go to the site and be exposed to the ads. Do you readers really think that the current ads in the RSS feed will not grow in size, complexity and annoyance as time goes on? Wake up! This ad placement policy will destroy the appeal of RSS! You are seeing the start of it now on TUAW!

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Say hello to Adsense TOS: "Web pages may not include incentives of any kind for users to click on ads. This includes encouraging users to click on the ads or to visit the advertisers' sites as well as ***drawing any undue attention*** to the ads. This activity is strictly prohibited in order to avoid potential inflation of advertiser costs. For example, your site cannot contain phrases such as "click here," "support us," "visit these links," or other similar language that could apply to any ad, regardless of content." (asterisks mine)

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Answering a few of these fine comments:

1. We don't put the number of comments in the feeds since that would make them update all day long and sensitive feed readers (which means all of them) would constantly reload our posts and anger our readers.

2. RSS feeds ignore JavaScript.

3. Sage has a problem with the ads. I don't know if it's the PNG format or some other Sage-specific thing, but that's the only feed reader I've seen the images fail like that in. Opera I'll look into...

Thanks!

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