To those of you who read my Simpy RSS feed to see what I'm collecting in my bookmarks, I just want to say that I had nothing to do with the appearance of advertising in that feed and it won't be staying. I've written Otis to find out what's going on, and to say that I'll happily pay good money for a premium no-ads service. It would suck to have to switch bookmarking apps again, because Simpy is a great tool, but I will NOT put up with advertising in my RSS feeds. (I just saw one for US Army recruiting, for fuck's sake! I am NOT going to start shilling for the hired killers. That's what prompted this entry.)

In fact, since my blogroll is entirely driven by Bloglines, I'm thinking of de-linking anyone who allows advertising in their feeds. Feed ads are intrusive and annoying, and to date RSS feeds have been about the one place on teh internets that has been mercifully free of that particular plague. I'm not at all responsive to the "ads support this service" argument as applied to RSS. I've come to terms with on-site advertising as more and more of the bloggers I like have decided to try to make a little extra from their sites, but feed ads are where I draw the line. "You can have my feed with ads, or no more of my writing" gets a simple answer from me: goodbye. I also suspect -- though of course I have no data to hand -- that this cancellation effect will more than compensate for any increased revenue that feed ads might generate.

Update: On re-reading that, I should add: I don't want this to sound like a threat, or even (at this stage) a complaint. Otis has been doing a lot of work behind the scenes lately, improving Simpy's stability and speed, and I presume that the ads appearing unwarranted and unannounced is simply a glitch that will speedily be fixed.