On a teleseminar panel I participated in a few months back, San Jose Mercurry News columnist Dan Gillmor told the audience he was asking his PR contacts to advise him of RSS feeds for press releases. He would no longer take them by e-mail. E-mail, he said, had become too much of a hassle, what with all the spam. RSS, on the other hand, allowed him to see only what he wanted to see.

Seems we can kiss this benefit of RSS goodbye. While we won’t see feeds to which we have not subscribed (at least, not yet), we will see advertising in some of the feeds we do want. Wired News reports this morning that Moreover, Topix.net, Feedster, and Weblogs (which runs several popular blogs like Engadget) are sneaking advertising into their feeds. If I offered Feedster as one of the channels for subscribing to this blog, I’m not sure I’d like the idea of my subscribers getting ads at all and certainly not ones that I’ve sanctioned.

On the other hand, bloggers interviewed by Wired whose feeds have been polluted with ads haven’t noted any complaints from their readers. Topix CEO Rich Skrenta doesn’t think it’s a big deal. “Folks understand that if there’s not a way to monetize content, there’s not going to be content,” he said. Feedster’s CEO characterizes the move as the maturing of RSS as a medium. Meanwhile, RadioLand founder and blogging godfather Dave Winer warns about exploiting the medium.