Google, as you probably know, has announced a beta of Adsense for Feeds.

One of the first blogs to sign up was Longhorn blogs, as described by Robert McLaws. Plug this feed into your RSS aggregator if you want to see what this looks like:

http://www.longhornblogs.com/mainfeed.aspx

There has been much commentary, positive and negative, about the wisdom of and economic imperatives for ads in RSS feeds. One thing that’s already clearly apparent is that Google’s beta implementation is no way optimized for blog content. This undermines the effectiveness of Adsense for Feeds as an advertising platform.

If you look at the LongHorn feed, you’ll notice the same ads popping up over and over, often in adjacent posts. (”Longhorn can wait” proclaims one ad, repeatedly.) This is because most posts in a blog tend to talk about the same thing, and because AdSense for Feeds thinks of posts as tiny isolated web pages rather than part of a larger feed– and part of an even larger conversation in the blogosphere.

Another potential problem is that the ads may detract from the message of the blog. Longhornblogs, for example, is hosted by a company that supports the .Net framework. Inline ads for a competitor to Longhorn– especially one shipping now– do not exactly reinforce the editorial voice the blog seeks to project.

I believe that ads in blogs will happen and will be important for sustaining the blog ecosystem. To do blog ads right, they will need to be more targeted than web ads, they will need to take into account the entire content and nature of the feed and not just indivdual posts, and they will need to give the blog author more of an editorial voice in what content makes it way into the blog.

Having achieved this, the next step will be to target ads based on the feeds that link to a given feed, rather than just the feed itself. A similar concept applies to web pages. Just as the pages that link to a given page help determine relevant search results, they can also help determine the optimum targeted advertisements to display in that contets.

With the right targeting and the right high valued ad inventory, blog ads could fetch a higher value per click than sponsored links in web pages.

I’ve written before about Greasemonkey and some of the cool things you can do with it.

Now Trixie brings many of the same benefits to IE. Not all scripts work in both browsers, but many do. To install Trixie, see the Trixie download page. The Trixie scripts page lists a set of scripts that have tested to work with Trixie.

Here is a message from the author of Trixie on the greasemonkey mailing list describing its creation and future plans. My quick hacks all occur over the proverbial weekend, but Trixie apparently came together in just 3-4 hours.

I wrote Trixie for fun (while on vacation) because I happen to frequently use IE (for some reasons as cited on the web site) and wanted to have fun like all you Greasemonkey users. I wrote it for myself, but then decided to post it on the web, so others could use it too….

Some of you commented that it is closed source. Well, yeah, as I said I didn’t think much about all this. Will I make it open source? I am thinking about it but I don’t promise it. Not because I am opposed to it, but because I am not sure I have the time commitment towards doing that.

There were mentions of the use of the .NET framework. I did consider writing it in C++, but then which IE user doesn’t have the framework installed (not counting all those on Win9x of course). And besides, it would have definitely taken much longer than 3-4 hours.

Will I add more features like cross domain xmlhttp? I am looking into it.

So, all you IE users, have fun without Firefox envy. And all you Firefox script writers - if you have a script that works on IE, send it my way and I shall link it from the Trixie website. And do consider writing scripts that work on both Firefox and IE. Maybe we could add little icons next to the scripts on Jeremy’s script repository to indicate which browsers they work on.