Content Matters

This week, both Google and AOL put their toes into the RSS water.

While Google seemed to dip their pinkie toe in, AOL jumped feet first, putting RSS front and center of their new portal.

AOL has teemed with Feedster to create "My AOL", a personalized home page on the AOL portal, in an effort to compete with Yahoo and MSN for ad revenues. In this new portal, currently in beta, feeds are the very heart of the system. Leveraging Feedster, AOL provides a simple, user friendly way to add feeds, whether from major content providers or your cousin's blog. It's a clean interface, with sponsored links on the right column, a la Google.

Google, on the other hand, has taken a very small sip of the RSS waters. In their new portal, you can pick and assemble off-the-shelf news, weather and related topics, while they also have a "Create a Section" area where you can subscribe to feeds. Unlike virtually every RSS reader out there today, the Google interface merely lists the headlines, requiring users to click into an article to see more info. Knowing Google, they will have a full fledged RSS reader in the weeks to come. They've never been afraid to test things, so it's not surprising they would put a limited function RSS reader out there, intending to improve it over time. At the same time, ClickZ reported today that Google applied for a patent today for embedding advertisements into syndicated RSS and Atom feeds.

The combined news is pretty clear. While most people still don't know what RSS is (and probably never will), RSS feeds are about to become a significant part of the content delivery world. And what's also clear is that the "advertising free" RSS feeds we've enjoyed for the past year are about to become a thing of the past. We will soon see significant ad dollars being spent on RSS feeds.