Something about RSS [RSS news and comments]

RSS2WAP.com:

We are introducing a new site: www.RSS2WAP.com. This is an online converter from RSS to WML used by WAP devices (especially mobile phones). Also, we have a WAP links directory. There are not many sites which offers their format as WML but using RSS2WAP you can convert all RSS feeds into WML. And the list of sites that offer RSS is growing fast.

Also, we have a version of the site available for WAP, from where you can open some popular RSS feeds or any other RSS you want. With this tool you can read news, weblogs, and RSS in general directly from WAP devices.

Moreover RSS ads:

Have you noticed ads in Moreover.com RSS feeds? Try:
http://p.moreover.com/cgi-local/page?index_topstories+rss
Their first entry is advertising. Is this a new trend to add advertising to RSS feeds? If Moreover is doing it what can we expect next?

RSS forum:

We just started a new forum focused on RSS, Atom, syndication but also weblogs issues. If you have something to say or questions please use our new forum.

Also, please ask here all questions regarding RSSlib or other scripts. We received too many emails and can't answer all of them.

There are not many forums with these topics, so let's try together to built one. Thanks.

More about RSS advertising:

First exam of adding advertising to Atom-to-RSS conversion tool passed. We already have some happy clients - thanks Anders, also for your ideas.
There are many people that looks like are just fine with this advertising. That's good.

I really think that RSS doesn't have support for advertising and this is very bad. I saw sites that closed their RSS feeds and I'm pretty sure that's because of too much traffic without any revenue. Think of a site that offers RSS feeds and have hundreds or thousands of subscribers. They check for news from their RSS readers and read from the site only news they want. This is good for visitors but could be not so good for site owner. Visitors could spend less time on the site, where advertising is displayed and still bandwidth is not reduced. Much traffic is consumed by RSS feeds, usually ads free and thus revenue free. And more, less time online on the site for visitors (and less clicks on ads). Using RSS visitors usually get directly to the target: the articles or news they want. This is not necessary good for site owner.

Then is another issue: if site owner adds advertising to their feeds (maybe text-based) there is a problem reporting this entry as new content. This is not a new entry in the RSS feed and shouldn't result a feed update in RSS reader. RSS format should have had support for ads, to allow them to be changeable without reporting the feed as updated.

Even more, there is not much support from advertisers for RSS feeds owners. For instance, Google AdSense doesn't support RSS (or Atom, if you want).

Everybody knows that a good source of income from a website (to cover expenses) come from advertising. If we want a winner format, largely used we should have solution to use advertising in RSS feeds. Otherwise we'll have only a fancy tool (ads free), and these things usually get unfashionable.

Final question: is very interesting to have everything ads free but is it possible?

Advertising in Atom2RSS:

Month by month this site got more visitors (and more traffic). Each month we increased the bandwidth. This growth pleases us but also worry us. We don't want to be a victim of our success. We don't want to be another www.blogmatrix.com or like other sites closed because of the bandwidth problems.

Our free service Atom2RSS is responsible from more than 75% of the traffic. We introduced a caching for this service but traffic isn't reduced too much. The fact is that more people are using this service and more links to it appear every day.

Because of this traffic we didn't launched other useful free services as hosted RSS2JS services (to publish news directly on your site) or online RSS reader.

So, a solution was to introduce advertising in Atom2RSS. This is only advertising to other sites of us and won't be for sure selling products or Viagra. We started this advertising last night but the reaction is quite strong. That's good. Thanks for all your messages about this.

We'll start today paid version of Atom2RSS for those that don't want advertising in their feeds. The fee will be very small ($14.95/year) and we hope that this fee will help this site to offer other good services and cover all expenses.

Help us to keep this service working. Thank you all.

Google Blog

Google has his own blog. Ok, you already know (see this). But as suggested in this article they don't have RSS feeds (only Atom). The same as for Blogger.com.

Try /atom2rss.php?atom=http://www.google.com/googleblog/atom.xml