As promised, we’ve now got ads running in the RSS feeds and are doing testing of this beta feature. If you notice any functional problems with the RSS feeds over the next day or so, please send a note to david@zatz.com.

During the implementation process, we realized that ads in feeds allowed us to do something cool that’ll make the feeds more useful to everyone. Up until now, when you clicked on a link in a feed news item, you were taken to our permalink page for that news item, rather than the actual news item itself. To get to the news item itself required a second click.

The reason for this was economic, of course. If you read the news items solely in the feed and just clicked through to the destination, you’d never see any of our sponsors’ ads, and we wouldn’t be able to continue to provide the service, since that’s what pays for the business.

But now, since you’re seeing ads in the feeds, we can let you click directly to the news items, bypassing the Web page permalink, getting you to the news you’re interested in with one click, rather than two.

In effect, rather than the feeds being a promotional vehicle for our Web site, the feeds become our new news medium directly. We’ll let you know how that all turns out. For now, though, click away, support our sponsors, and let us know if you run into any snags.