This critique of Safari 5’s new Reader feature has been making the rounds today and it’s a good read, if only to test your acuity for spotting parody. Reader is a feature that adds a Readability-style view of a web page that lets you focus on the text you want to read and not the piles and piles of cruft that litters a great deal of the web these days.

Your first hint that you’re in for a treat is that it’s written by a self-professed “tech analyst and community manager” – now, there’s a title no one would self-apply where I come from. The page itself is loaded with ads – a banner ad at the top, immediately followed by an AdWord block, columns of ads along the side, those awful Vibrant in-text advertising links, more AdWord blocks completely unrelated to the content. The article is broken into three “pages” to artificially gin-up page views and the rest of the page is littered with social media sharing buttons (Jim Lynch has 17 facebook “fans” you’ll be excited to learn).

The argument Lynch is trying to make amongst all of that monetization is that ads pay for web sites like his and Safari Reader hides those ads and is therefore morally wrong. This is something of a mission of Lynch’s, he dedicates a full top level piece of his site navigation to another post about ad-blockers. I honestly don’t know what’s worse, that Lynch somehow doesn’t understand the problem or that he does and simply chooses to ignore it.

There’s a bigger truth here, though, hidden amongst all of that spammy content and gnashing of teeth. There’s really no reason why people like Lynch should have ever been making any money with their site. The ability install some free software on a cheap webhost and add a few lines of javascript aren’t a license to print money. I don’t mean to pick on Lynch here, he’s merely representative of the kind of entitlement that argues that merely having a blog means you should also have an income.

Not to get all Merlin about it, but this shit takes work and good work will be rewarded by an audience that respects what you do and feels that you respect them and the attention they pay you. AdWord blocks aren’t work, dirty tricks to boost your CPM aren’t work, making things that people want to see and read and pass on and get excited about is work. People who do work at this are probably the ones most excited about Safari Reader because it means that more people are going to spend more time reading the words that they put actual effort into writing. The sad fact is, those are probably the sites that need Safari Reader the least while the ones that need it most aren’t worth reading to begin with.