RSS ad debate goes on

Dave Winer responds to Jason Calacanis, and one of Jason’s company blogs chimes in.

Any content channel that attracts lots of attention will get monetized – the joys of capitalism and a free market. One can argue all you want about HOW the monetization happens, but that’s not really in our control, not yet at least. People will experiment, push the limits of what’s acceptable, get burned, and eventually arrive at models the market will accept. That process is still raging away around the Web – RSS is just the latest content delivery channel, with its own unique dynamics. It too is being commericalized, and that ain’t all a bad thing. It’s good to debate the acceptable bounds, but we are only in the infancy of the experimentation phase, so we haven’t even really established what’s possible, much less preferable.

This part of the post from the RSS Weblog gets it nicely:

Every medium works out its commercial relationship with its customers. The marketplace will rule on this matter. If publishers are making a huge mistake by commercializing their RSS feeds, they will pay the price in lost business. But let’s not suppose that this is a moral issue of any sort. RSS is a channel, pure and simple.