RSS advertising patent?

As you may or may not know, Google has filed a patent application covering RSS advertising. There is not much I can say here, beyond the classic: what the FUCK is wrong with USPTO?

I know they are having some problems lately but this is just silly! This should have been a really simple case, where the examiner opens the envelope, reads the description, chuckles a little and dumps it in the trashcan! Does anyone at USPTO even know what RSS is?

It's funny, but feedburner has a feature which allows you to inject AdSense into your feed. This has been available for a while now. Since they are using Google's technology, would this constitute infringement? And since that feature surely predates the patent application, could it be considered prior art?

How difficult would it be to hack a php script that would inject context sensitive ads into your feed? If you really want good parsing and context sensitive stuff then it could maybe take couple of hours to implement. If you are happy with just random ads, it's a job for 5 minutes. How is this even an invention?

Tags: google, rss, advertising, google patents, google rss, google rss advertising