Is it just me, or are advertisements in RSS feeds the most ridiculous thing ever? I understand the need to monetize content, but this is ridiculous; advertisements in RSS are the antithesis of everything RSS stands for. The beauty of syndication formats like RSS is that there's an implicit trust that the content in each feed is 'pure data.' If I wanted to build an aggregator of certain categories based on RSS feeds, how would I strip out the advertisements?

Also, I am appalled by the number of people using Feedburner to generate their own site data. Sure, it's easier ... but what happens when Feedburner goes down? Does the whole blogosphere go down with it?