Bandwidth does cost money

Dave Winer needs a good bitch-slap.

Over and over again Dave criticizes people for including ads in their RSS/Atom feeds. The worst instance is here:

[Taegan Goddard] brought the ads back, without notice, without permission of the readers. It's pulling my attention into his stuff, and dammit that's my aggregator not his, and not FeedBurner's and not his advertiser's (who I won't name here).

My aggregator? My aggregator? Funny you should mention that, because you used to run a company that made an aggregator. And guess what -- it wasn't a free product! I suspect that's because in order to develop Radio Userland, Dave needed to hire employees and pay their salaries. This is called capitalism.

Now Dave would deny content-providers the same opportunity to recoup costs, just because they're content providers, and he's a content aggregator. I would call this hypocrisy, but I think Dave just calls it a "fine line".

P.S. ResExcellence has come out and plainly said the reason they don't offer an RSS feed is because it would harm their ad revenue. Dave, would you rather they have no feed at all, or have a feed with ads in it?