RSS Goes All Ajaxy on Me with OneFeed

Nathan Weinberg today points to an AJAX-based RSS reader called OneFeed. The aggregator uses a three-paned interface for displaying feeds.

One observation here. None of these web-based readers - yet - displays the content you click in a feed within an aggregator pane, as some desktop readers do. Someone will try this soon, if they haven't done so already. If it's Google, Yahoo or Microsoft it could cause a significant power shift in how content is monetized if you think about it. Imagine if Google, with its reader, or Yahoo, with their new mail-based aggregator, employed this tactic and ran text ads. You'd never leave the shelter of their dome. Sites that were once called portals could actually earn that moniker legitimately by wrapping contextual ads around other people's content and then monetizing it. No one's doing that right now, but somebody surely will in the months ahead. It's too easy.