I got a flurry of calls on Friday from our readers because Newsgator suddenly--and without permission--put ads against our blogs in their RSS readers. Our full-feeds are published for individual, non-commercial use only. We have been very clear with everyone--from Yahoo to AOL to Newsgator--that we do not allow ads against our full feeds.

Now, the folks at Newsgator are all good people who I consider friends. I called them up and they were nice enough to step out of their board meeting on Friday to let me know it was technical mistake. I take them on their word, and the fact that they immediately pulled back the changes is good enough for me.

To be very clear with everyone in the industry: WE DO NOT ALLOW ADVERTISING AGAINST OUR *FULL* RSS FEEDS. If you want to put ads against our feeds you *must* use the headline feeds and no more than the first 100 characters of the post.

When someone does put ads against our full feeds we:

• a) start up the legal machine
• b) block the site from loading our full feeds and replace those feeds with one that tells users which RSS readers we support (i.e. the ones that don't violate our copyright).
• c) report them for violating the Google Adsense, Tribal Fusion, etc. terms of service which prohibits people from putting ads against content they do not own.
  

If RSS reader companies want to make this a showdown we will simply:

• a) pull our full feeds from your services
  
• b) create a private labeled RSS reader that we own and only allow our full feeds in it and compete with you
• c) work with the other large publishers to support the private labeled readers

Let me be clear to RSS reader companies: You have no right to make money off of our full-feeds. None. Any advertising against our full content is ours and it belongs to our bloggers and shareholders. If you want to make money off our full feeds you need to cut a deal with us--it's called syndication and folks have been doing it for a long time.

THERE IS NO BACK DOOR WAY TO ADVERTISE AGAINST OUR CONTENT--I DON'T CARE IF YOU CALL IT RSS OR IF YOU DON'T HAVE A WAY TO MAKE MONEY OFF YOUR RSS READER! That is your problem to solve not ours.

I've been talking to Newsgator and many other RSS readers for years BEGGING one of them to do a deal with us to split revenue in our full feeds but no one with critical mass has stepped up to the plate. If someone with an RSS reader at scale wants to do a deal with us I have a very simple solution:

a) We will take the leader board on the top of our feeds and give you our ad code for it.
b) We will let you have the skyscraper below the fold.

That gives you about 20-30% of the revenue for the pages. That's far in my books. If you want this deal it needs to be done with a contract--don't go doing it on your own now. :-)

This is a very serious issue and we are going to fight to protect our bloggers and their content. Period, end of story.


NOTE: I'm hoping to hear from the Newsgator folks on their blogs:
http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog/
http://www.feld.com/blog/
http://blogs.newsgator.com/daily/

Gosh darn it!

Someone figured out that users have RSS feeds on Netscape... we were gonna hold off on exposing this a little bit more because of server strain issues, but I guess the cat is out of the bag.

I wonder what other features the users will find before we annouce them!

After finding that Rojo was the #2 or #3 reader for Weblogs, Inc. blogs (thanks Feedburner!), I've been playing with the social RSS reader and I have to say it is excellent. When the service launched it felt like a poor version of Bloglines, however bloglines has been stagnant for a year or two (three?) and Rojo has added a ton of new features that really help move interesting stories up the food chain.

Please add my blog to your Rojo page!

Here is TUAW's latest feedburner stats.... check our the dark horse Rojo putting up major numbers. Anyone have thoughts on this?

11%.. can that be right?

click image for details.

Bloglines is slipping... figures since the software hasn't changed in about three years from what I can see. Check out Google Desktop and Rojo hitting second and third place--wow!

Also, Newsgator only 4%?!?! Wow.

Been testing Feedburner on TUAW and just started with TVSquad. They have some very slick stats.

Click images to blow up.

My pal Eric Rice pointed out that Podshow was deep linking to us without credit, which as everyone knows is a big no-no. Here is an example.

As Adam points out, we're old friends from the Silicon Alley days and we spoke today about it. I gave him some simple suggestion for linking into our stuff, and he assured me it was just a speed error (which I'm sure is the case). The simple solutions is, of course, to put a box that credits the publisher with two or three lines/points:

• The Engadget podast is produced by Weblogs, Inc.
• The RSS feed for the Engadget podcast can be found here.

We're fine with being in anyone's directory as long as we're credited as the owners of the work and have the standard link back.