Tim Bray writes:
Adam Curry posted a note on Monday that I found pretty surprising. In the future, will you have to pay to get into RSS aggregators? Ouch.
Apparently, about a year and a half ago Mr. Curry purchased Radio and Frontier licenses, and then paid Userland $10,000 to be included in the feeds that the products come pre-loaded with.
…
I was emailing with Brent Simmons about this (by the way, his NetNewsWire comes with no paid-to-play entries). We both seemed to think that this kind of thing is OK, as long as it’s clearly marked as such, like the little labels in your newspaper that say “advertisement” when there’s an ad dressed up to look like a newspaper story.
When I originally started using Radio for a blog tool (since replaced with Movable Type) and a news aggregator (since replaced with NewsMonster and NewsDesk), I wondered why Adam Curry’s feed was one of the built-in feeds. His feed was one of the first feeds I deleted.
I’m sure someone finds Adam’s blog interesting, but I found the signal to noise ratio to be even lower than for Dave’s blog. Way too many posts consisted primarily of fawning worship of Radio and Dave. Of course, the ego stroking from a celebrity might have been enough for nearly any news aggregator developer to make it a built-in feed, but there are several other blogs that highly praise functionality in Radio that didn’t make the cut. So why this one?
Now that Adam reveals he paid $10,000 for what was essentially an advertisement that was not marked as such, everything makes sense. Whether or not Adam thinks Radio is any good (and I don’t question that he does appear to sincerely like it), he needed to protect his investment. If enough people claim Radio is great, that will create a buzz that will lead more people to try it. That, of course, leads to more consumers being directed to Adam’s “cult of personality” blog. Again, that’s fine. I’m sure that some people are extremely happy to have discovered his blog via the built-in feed. But, the disclosure of the payment has come far too late.
Now, he feels ripped off because he is afraid RSS will die out and he will lose his captive audience. So, he’s launching a personal campaign to reward aggregator developers only if they refuse to support the newer syndication format that frightens him. Wouldn’t it be simpler and more reasonable just to add another feed for the new format?