John Battelle's Searchblog: RSS Blender: Interesting Prototype

Battelle's friend Toni Schneider points him to RSS Blender, a service that inserts new posts linking to Amazon books into your blog feed, based on contextual "analysis" of your other blog posts.

When I first read Battelle's description, I assumed that it worked like VibrantMedia, i.e., it would insert links into the body of my posts, thereby compromising my editorial integrity (laugh).

But the Blender approach is fantastic! Ads in my feed were generally relevant (and reasonably plentiful, about one adv for every four posts), and most importantly, were clearly marked as Blender posts.

Obviously the prototype only runs against Amazon's book database, but could be applied to any database of products/services/ads, etc.

Companies such as Moreover might do well by themselves to consider integrating such a solution into their free aggregated feed offerings.