So… some random surfing led me to Scoble’s post about why Google might be syndication shy.

This lead me to Steve Rubel’s post on that subject which, in turn, lead me to an article on how Overature is working with Feedburner to deliver ads within RSS feeds.

That’s the important point.

Feedburner… 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 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, do package tracking 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 the feed, and advertisers get reach into RSS via a targeted, contextual ad-serving technology. Right on!