>Ads in RSS feed

>Google is bringing AdSense to RSS and Dave seems to be mildly against it. In fact, some people have resolved that they would unsubscribe a feed if it has ads.

I thought about it and here is my stand: I don’t mind that as long as they are non-obtrusive. Which means, if there is a pop ad from a feed, I’ll surely unsubscribe. If an ad is inserted right in the middle of the content (may be as an entry itself or as if it looks part of the entry), I’ll mostly unsubscribe. But if it is non-obtrusive (as Google puts ads on its result page), I am pretty much fine with it. In fact, I don’t see anything wrong in it.

Putting ads in RSS is just as good/bad as putting them on websites. If you visit websites that have ads, you should not have any problems with ads in RSS. These are just two different mechanisms that the content developer is using to deliver the content to you. And what is the content developer expecting in return? Some money. What’s wrong with that? If Kottke quits his job and runs kottke.org full time so that he can deliver some pretty good content to you, why do you mind him making some money?

I believe, Ads in RSS will have the same kind of dynamics as they have on the websites. People won’t really start unsubscribing RSS feeds just because they contain ads. What will matter is the value of the content and to what extent it gets diluted if mixed with ads.

>Can Gmail win over Outlook?

>After I started using Gmail, I got pretty confident that if Google was to offer the Gmail core to enterprises (as a replacement of Exchange/Outlook), Microsoft may have a hard time. The primary reason being that Gmail delivers its rich functionality and a very good UI through a browser which makes it work across the platforms. After all, the whole argument that has always been given against web based applications is that they can’t have rich UI. Now, it’s there. Rich and fast and secure too.

But today I realized one weakness that Gmail has over Exchange/Outlook: plugins. I don’t see a way how you can write Gmail plugins to extend. Ok, most of the people don’t use plugins. And Google will make sure that it has enough features to serve your purpose in more or less all the situations. Still, it would be so much better if one could extend Gmail in their own way by writing plugins.

As far as my understanding of web applications goes, there does not seem to be a way to do it now. Maybe, going forward, next versions of HTML (XHTML?) and JavaScript will allow that to be done. But that will still take a couple of years to be developed and supported.

It will be interesting to see how Gmail evolves.

>While I was vacationing

>I am back from my vacation. And I see that the world hasn’t really changed in past 2 weeks; just a couple of events here and there and that’s about it. During my vacation, I accessed Internet only once and my cell phone was mostly out of coverage area. So, you see, it was a real vacation; not only from work but also from every other activity of my routine life. A break as it is called.

Yes, I’ll be sharing photographs. I shot 6 rolls, so, I expect at least 6 photographs that I could share with ya folks.

And most probably, there will be a story too. I want to write one but am not too sure if I’ll be able to. A story (the 44 hours of nirvana kind) demands a lot of time and solitude and I may have none of them. But let’s see. It will entirely depend on how forcefully the story tries to come out of me.