Online Journalism Review has an article on whether to use RSS feeds or not and whether they drive more traffic. It doesn't say anything particularly new, but it lays out some of the issues people have with RSS and the talk of including ads.

One thing I found noteworthy in the article was this comment:

But there is a downside compared to e-mail. "You don't have much control over how it's presented so you can't feature an article or a package in the same way you can in email and say it's the single most important thing of the day," Bauer said.

In RSS feeds, all headlines look the same and are given equal weight. Some sites are learning to pay particular attention to the blurbs that can accompany headlines knowing that may be the key to enticing readers.

To which I would reply, well...yeah. It'd be nice if content providers would entertain the possibility that some people like that, that we'd prefer to decide for ourselves what news is noteworthy and not have people pushing Scott Peterson or Kobe Bryant or some other not-very-interesting 'number one story' twenty-four hours a day.