For the original publishers, they don’t get subscribers, but they do maybe get more readers if Robert et al decide their posts are significant. You could potentially have 10000 people reading your content (full post content), and have zero subscribers to your own feed.

I think I covered that point.

The problem is you are assuming that every aspect of your linkblog is good.

Other services from choice / respect allow sharing, but dont provide an RSS feed of the shared content.
E.g. Bloglines, Pageflakes

The RSS feed can be looked on as a feature, but there would have to be a way for publishers to prevent the feeds being re-fed to non-subscribers.

I have discussed some reasons for this above.

I actually forgot about one very important point.

There are various email autoresponder applications now available that are able to send sequenced personal RSS feeds to someone.
These have been around for over a year. That content is intended to be private.

If people are going to openly share their RSS feeds, that potential for RSS is destroyed.

RSS as a solution for subscription content is effectively being destroyed.

I actually own an auto-responder script that would allow me to have paid subscriber podcasts or vlogs. It can’t be used now because of RSS sharing.

If all of these issues have been discussed to death and I missed them, fair enough.

However, I think all the points I am making haven’t been discussed at all, and are being overlooked, maybe because it is Google, and as I started off the post…

Google can do nothing wrong… or can they?

Obviously Linkblogs are not the same as Bitacle. There is no monetisation, and they are not being indexed, but that doesn’t mean the current implementation is totally innocent.
Linkblogs can be easily rebloged, bypassing many inadequate protection methods.

Maybe sharing should only be allowed for content labelled with either GPL or CC.

Maybe Google should only have a javascript reader as others have done.

Maybe sharing RSS feeds should be stopped altogether, or for a “private” tag to be possible, and respected by all aggregators, so that RSS could once again be usable for private feeds.

There is a way to add some of your own automatic tracking to every feed item. I suppose that would be a good subject for a future post (once I have implemented it myself)

Ivan