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Source:Mashable!

Adam Ostrow wrote this weekend on the horrible state of advertising targeting on AdSense for RSS, which as we’ve learned today is the replacement for the FeedBurner Advertiser Network. Allen Stern at CenterNetworks noted exactly how disappointed he has become in this transition from Google’s $100 million folly which is FeedBurner.

As Allen says, cost-per-click advertisements just don’t seem to be that great of a fit for RSS feeds, particularly Google’s AdSense units, the stingiest of all the ad formats.  Google, in what’s becoming a trademark fashion, bought up FeedBurner and trashed the company. Instead of loudly gutting and relaunching the company, the primary draw for FeedBurner’s existence was very quietly eulogized on a Google Group posting, as noted by Valleywag today:

This is a quick note to confirm that FeedBurner’s former, independent ad network, FeedBurner Ad Network (aka “FAN”), is officially closed. No new applications for FAN publishers are being accepted and we expect the broad variety of options provided through AdSense (including the new AdSense for Feeds product, powered with FeedBurner feeds) will give publishers valuable new revenue-earning potential.

The system worked, as many have noted by personal experience, to deliver ads that payed out around a $10 CPM or even higher. Most folks are lucky to have an AdSense account that pays a fraction of that amount, and will be even more hard pressed to find joy there given the poor targeting and traditionally poor placement of ads in a typical RSS post item.

Given how long I’ve utilized AdSense, I have no expectations for its improvement, unlike some of my fellow bloggers.  Simply because the strongest reason (their monetization) for keeping FeedBurner no longer exists doesn’t mean it’s time to dump the service as Steven Hodson suggests today. It does make Google particularly weak in this product sector, and leaves them wide open for strong competition. Steven outlines the reasons:

When you consider the following

Google closes down the FeedBurner Advertising Network

The FeedBurner site metrics don’t even come close to jiving with other services including Google’s own site metrics service

FeedBurner subscriber counts are not consistent or can be gamed

So tell me why are we still using this service?

The only purpose at this point in keeping FeedBurner around it portability and compatibility of data. Having a system that can read all the various flavors and manglings of RSS and Atom out there in the world and then serve it back up in an appropriate manner almost flawlessly is still a rare thing. I can’t think of another competitor to FeedBurner, in fact, that does this.

More importantly, FeedBurner accounts serve as a nice shield from the often transitory nature of Web 2.0 products.  Any time I generate a feed I want to expose to the public, I don’t care if it’s hosted by Google themselves, I run it through FeedBurner, because I know if the original feed goes away, I can instantly re-point the feed the public subscribes to towards another source.  I don’t have to lose subscribers.

This, though, is a relatively easy thing to code and get running. What isn’t easy is building a business around monetizing RSS. The first company to come up with the silver bullet in that department has only a few small hoops to jump, and they’ll be able to slay the mighty Google.

In the meantime, I suggest folks roll their own solution. RSS files are a great place for brand advertisements, and both pundits quoted in this article (Steven Hodson and Allen Stern) have cited success in selling their own ads for their feeds.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Google AdSense in Feedburner RSS Feeds, Coming. Soon. Seriously!Feedburner Adds Self-Publishing AdsFeedburner, aka The Splog SlayerFeedburner Acquires BlogbeatFeedburner Allows Bloggers AdSense AccessGoogle Acquiring Feedburner?FeedBurner Handling AOL Network’s Feeds

Source:Mashable!

While those of us in the social media might like to believe that information is open, transparent, and free, the fact is that for the larger Web outside of this niche that this isn’t necessarily the case. This has been made more than apparent with the current legal action against TheFunded.com by EDF Ventures as they sue for the identity of one of the site members. Another example came this past weekend, when three MIT students were gagged from giving a presentation about the security weakness they found in the fare cards used by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority.

While the incident with TheFunded.com may end up being a replay of the recent lawsuit against Torrent Bay, the court order to stop the students from giving their presentation at this past weekend’s DefCon 16 get together in Las Vegas is a different matter. As Declan McCullagh reported on the Security blog at c|net:

U.S. District Judge Douglas Woodlock on Saturday ordered the students not to provide "program, information, software code, or command that would assist another in any material way to circumvent or otherwise attack the security of the Fare Media System." Woodlock granted the MBTA’s request after a hastily convened hearing in Massachusetts that took place at 8 a.m. PDT on Saturday.

The MBTA, which has not been saying very much publicly on the matter, did suggest in their court filing on the matter that this was a matter of public safety

The MBTA, which is a state government agency, alleges in its lawsuit that "disclosure of this information will significantly compromise the CharlieCard and CharlieTicket systems" and "constitutes a threat to public health or safety."

They were also more than up to the task to threaten the students with an FBI investigation as part of their tactics to muzzle the three:

But then the conversations took a hostile turn when MBTA mentioned an FBI criminal investigation of the MIT students. In the "initial contact, they said the FBI was investigating and that was not–we didn’t find that to be a very pleasing way to start a nice dialogue with them. And we got a little concerned about what was happening," said Anderson, one of the students

It would seem that while the MBTA managed to convince the original judge who issued the restraining order that this was all about public safety I think it is far more about them protecting their revenue stream instead. This has nothing at all to do with public safety and this fact hasn’t escaped the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) who have supplied the MIT students with legal assistance to fight this gag order. For them and security researchers; who are watching this case closely, this is more about the First Amendment rights to publish freely.

In response the MBTA has filed a motion to amend to the order to only cover non-public information, which is almost laughable considering that the CD handed out to attendees of the DefCon convention contained all the information that would have been a part of the presentation. Along with that, in their filing for the gag order the MBTA included some of the very information that the students said they would have withheld from their presentation

But the students have maintained that they planned to withhold key information from their talk that would have allowed someone to replicate their tests in a manner that could be used to defraud the transit system. (Some of that key information, however, has since become public because the MBTA included it in documents that it submitted to the court.)

So, while for all intents and purposes the information that the MBTA wanted to keep out of the hands of the people is already out there for whoever wants it, they will be going back into court the have the gag order extended. In response the EFF has gotten eleven computer scientists and researchers to draft a letter in support of the students to be presented to the court

The letter supporting the students is signed by Dave Farber, who holds the title of distinguished career professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and is purveyor of the popular Interesting People mail list as well as a trustee of the EFF; and computer scientists Steve Bellovin from Columbia University; David Wagner from UC Berkeley; Dan Wallach from Rice University; and Matt Blaze from the University of Pennsylvania. Wired.com columnist Bruce Schneier is also a signatory to the letter.

I could almost see this action by the MBTA to seek the court order if this was truly a case of protecting the public, but it is more than obvious that this isn’t the case. This move by the MBTA is nothing short of using the courts to protect their revenue stream. Rather than working with the students and make their fare cards better and more secure, they intimidate them with threats of the FBI and use the power of the courts to muzzle them. I would bet that based on past cases like this the MBTA will end up losing their request for an extension of the gag order but then again the courts aren’t always know for their common sense.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 at 11:35 pm and is filed under Defcon, Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.