Subject: Re: Time to add advertising to Atom?

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2004 09:24:10 EDT

In a message dated 10/24/2004 11:12:25 AM GMT Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> If advertising goes in as unmarked content, then for many end users
> this will be lowering the signal/noise ration of the information
> source. Sure, this is bound to be one avenue pursued by marketeers,
> the blanket treatment of people as customers is found in every other
> media. But targetting is another marketing strategy, and providing
> additional metadata can potentially improve the
> publisher(seller)/consumer(buyer) matchmaking.

My take on this is that well-targeted advertising could be a plus. For 
example, on certain rapidly developing topics it would be great to get information 
about new relevant tools. That type of advertising might be welcome on 
precisely targeted feeds.

For more general-purpose feeds I would want to have the granularity of 
control to turn advertising off for that particular feed. Perhaps that would be 
possible at individual feed level or, if not, a blanket setting in the user agent 
(analogous to blocking pop ups) would be welcome, whether on a per-feed or a 
blanket basis.

One related question in my mind is how best (if at all) user agents will 
separate/display advertising content from normal content.

Andrew Watt