So… some random surfing led me to Scoble’s “post”:http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/04/06.html#a9821 about why Google might be syndication shy.

This lead me to Steve Rubel’s post on that “subject”:http://www.micropersuasion.com/2005/04/why_google_is_s.html which, in turn, lead me to an article on how Overature is working with Feedburner to deliver “ads”:http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3439321 within RSS feeds.

That’s the important point.

“Feedburner”:http://www.feedburner.com… Yahoo! or Google should either re-create this service (unlikely) or purchase Feedburner (more likely). Since Feedburner’s business model places it as an intermediary between blogs and their readers (readers that use RSS anyway) Yahoo!/Google would be buying reach into blogs. Oh, and they get a _little thing_ called reach into RSS feeds. “Clearly”:http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/home RSS is looking like it will be a mass-medium… ie, everyone will use it in the future.

Perhaps in a few years RSS becomes a big part of how users interact with the web. Heck, you can already get a Gmail RSS “feed”:https://gmail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=13474&query=atom&topic=0&type=f&ctx=search, do “package tracking”:http://www.zoinger.com/archives/2005/04/03/22.18.02/ via RSS, so why not? Being stuck in the “old school” of browsing-only ad serving — ie, not offering RSS reach and ad-serving technologies — could be a huge shortcoming for web media companies.

The Feedburner model is pretty cool… publishers get ad revenue from their RSS feeds by merely letting Feedburner “serve”:http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/create the feed, and advertisers get reach into RSS via a targeted, contextual ad-serving technology. Right on!