Its interesting that you mentioned Pointcast and RSS in the same post, for one reason: Advertising. How long is it going to take for major media "feed producers" (NY Times, Yahoo etc) to include ads in the feeds. CNET doesn't publish the full article text for that very reason - you have to go their site so they get their ad impressions. Unfortunately, that's what "mainstream" means. If a significant portion of viewers start hitting the feeds with agregators instead of the ad-sponsored web sites, you can bet its gonna happen(if it hasn't already).

You bring up a great point, and the debate on the appropriate intersection of advertising and rss is a good one.

Can you embed context-sensitive ads in a feed (much like Google's AdSense http://www.google.com/adsense/ ) without the consumers of the feed revolting? Infoworld does it ( http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/09/14/RSS-IW-ads ), but they do it poorly.

The CNET model makes some sense to me (they also do this at MarketingWonk feed http://www.marketingwonk.com ), although it's really kind of a work-around to not being able to monetize the feed more directly.

Start charging for feed? There's a good article here ( http://shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html ) about that, at least as it pertains to the small-scale feed sources. There might in fact be feeds that could support a paid-subscriber base, but the payment mechanisms are way too cumbersome at this point.

What other possibilities do you see?

I really wouldn't mind a text insert at the bottom of an item much like you see with Hotmail and Yahoo mail. As for IW, I agree, the idea of inserting dynamic content in an allegedly static item is silly. Its not going to work. Readers would definitely bail out if the same story kept coming up as new just because the ad changed. Items as ads is probably the most agreeable of options when you're talking about aggregators.

Paid subscriptions is interesting. How would someone authenticate their requests for the feed given all the different methods of consuming feeds? I agree that it would probably take time.

The advertising world would have an interesting beast on their hands from a numbers perspective. How would impressions be counted? A pull on a feed counts as an impression? Some interesting problems exist here, or maybe it won't matter with click throughs like how AdSense works.

What would happen if the specs enabled items to be tagged as advertising, content, comments, etc? For one, it could allow a new generation of aggregators that allow the user to ignore types of items. Otherwise you will see techniques very similar to the browser plug-ins that blocked banner ads(http://news.com.com/2100-1001-208101.html?legacy=cnet). In that sense, RSS could become a cat and mouse game just like email/spam. Either way, I think you will see these types of programs show up. I think the specs should allow for handling this in a simpler way.

Well, it should be fun to watch anyway, right?

p.s. still in Chicago - downtown. You want to grab lunch sometime soon?