Re: Time to add advertising to Atom?

[Walter Underwood <wunder@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I believe that an advertising marker should be in the Atom core or in an
extension published at the same time as the core.

Some big reasons for this:

1. Publishers need advertising, so we can't pretend it won't exist.

2. Many ad channels (Google, for example) clearly mark ads for the user,
so marked ads are acceptable to publishers. They may even be preferable,
because they avoid some kinds of inadvertant deceptive advertising.

3. Automatic consumers(robots) need to be able to sort out the entries
from the ads. Ads mised in with search results is just not acceptable to
the users of search engines or profile services (pubsub.com).

4. A recommended place for advertising allows clients to push back on
advertising in regular entries, links, whatever (spam). Also, it may be
possible to apply anti-spam laws to advertising which is not properly marked.
[No, I'm not a laywer or a legislator, but spam is everywhere and legal
remedies are one current approach. Enabling those gives us more anti-spam
weapons.]

Some approaches:

Ads as unmarked entries: This puts the responsibility entirely on the
client. Welcome to the spam filtering business, again.

Ads as marked entries: Good for robots, also allows clients to display
a marker with the ads to distinguish them from other entries.

Ads as non-entry items: We're having enough fun with entries. I can't
imagine adding another kind of media content and getting it finished.

Ads as links: Almost as complicated as a new kind of entry. An ad would
need several coordinated links: an href, an optional image, text, etc.

wunder
--
Walter Underwood
Principal Architect
Verity Ultraseek