Blog standards are a hot topic in the blogosphere. Jon Dube wrote about how helpful RSS feeds from Yahoo and MSN could be to journalists. He also owned up to working for MSNBC.com in this story onPoynter Online - Build Your Own News Site. Viewer/userRichard Silverstein takes Dube to task despite his disclaimer about working for MSNBC.com, pointing out that "...the features you were touting are easily available to anyone who knows anything about rss feeds & how to use them. You don't really need MyMSN or MyYahoo to get you to the same place." I have met Jon (my disclaimer) and he is a very sincere and nice person it seems, maybe kind of young, but that's not actionable. But I have to say, I had the same reaction to the "recommendation" about the Yahoo and MSN feeds that commentor Silverstein had. "Touting" and "shilling" were words that came to mind. Anybody that is already using a news aggregator can get the feeds directly that do anything that Yahoo or MSN services do, so the column did seem to veer dangerously close to shilling. My students and I will discuss it as an ethical issue case study. It will be interesting to see what members of the bzzz/WOM generation think of it. What do you think?