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Take a look at this. On December 31, 2003, Google filed a patent for ads in syndicated, or RSS feeds.

Whether or not they win the patent is a much bigger question, since the basic idea may be non-enforceable, according to Randy Charles Morin. Randy also notes that this patent was filed roughly one month before Pheedo showed up.

Techdirt says that "considering that just about every contextual ad company is doing this without having read the Google patent," the patent may be too obvious to work. Very true, since putting advertising in a content medium is not a new idea.

Jason Kottke points out that he mentioned RSS advertising a year before the Google patent. He also points out the the patent could be for targeted feed ads, not just feed ads, in which case they would already fall under previous Google patents for targeted contextual advertising. I'd like to add that, in that case, Google might have to share targeted feed advertising with Yahoo, who owns the same rights to targeted advertising Google does (thanks to their aquisition of Overture).

Complicated, complicated. But suffice to say, Google will not prevent others from producing RSS ads as a whole, ever.
(via Findory)

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Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.

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