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| joeymoggie |
| A Personal Blog : About life's happenings, current events, Celebrity News, Cats, Sewings & a few meme's thrown in for good measure. |
| Language: English |
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| Rick's Ruminations: Full Feeds |
| 2007-04-18 18:10:12 |
David Churbuck's recent post imploring bloggers to publish full feeds reminded me that I've been meaning to comment on this for a while. It's a subject I speak on regularly at SES, and some of the recommendations I make are not the same ones you see made on a number of blogs.
First of all, I think the primary justification often given for partial feeds - that it will drive higher clickthroughs back to the publisher's site - is off-base. As people subscribe to feeds, they subscribe to more feeds. And that means they're consuming more content, which means that each click out of the feed reader is taking the reader away from more content. In other words, feed reading is consumption-oriented, not transactionally focused. We've seen no evidence that excerpts on their own drive higher clickthroughs.
Secondly, the reason many larger publishers give for trying to steer traffic back to the site is that they can make money on the site. Guess what? You can monetize feeds as well - giving you the option of deciding where and how you want to monetize your audience, instead of assuming that the feed's sole purpose is to drive traffic back to your site (which is a dubious proposition anyway).
I did an interview on Monday where the podcaster asked me how to make feeds "stickier". What he was actually asking was how to get readers more engaged with feed content: how can feeds be made more interactive? A lot of the thinking behind FeedFlare was that we needed a way to give publishers tools to increase the likelihood that readers would in fact engage. Clicking through to read a copy of the post they just read is unlikely to drive a lot of click activity. But clicking through to read the comments will. Bookmarking the post at del.icio.us will drive further activity, as will voting for the post at Digg. (And in those latter examples, they'll both increase secondary traffic growth, by building awareness of your content at those sites.) In other words, adding opportunities for the readers to do things other than just read a copy of the post goes a long way to increasing the probability that the readers will actually do something.
Too few publishers take advantage of the next logical step: building their own FeedFlare units to direct attention to other parts of the publisher's site. If you publish archives by category, why not give readers the ability to browse more articles like the one they just read by going to the category archive? Promoting an event? Do what the folks at TechPresident are doing and include a link to the event with every post:
That link gets seen by everyone subscribed to the feed, dramatically increasing the visibility of the Personal Democracy Forum event (disclosure: I'm speaking at PdF, and FeedBurner's a sponsor). Creating this FeedFlare takes less than five minutes, and it's then something you can share with anyone else who wants to support the event. (I won't go into all the variations here, but creating FeedFlares for fundraising, micro-sites for a specific function, etc., all make a ton of sense. You get the idea.) At this point, the feed is not just a way of distributing content, but is equally about driving awareness and delivering actions - just not all focused exclusively on the individual post.
There's another angle to publishing full feeds that doesn't get a lot of attention: the value of links contained in the posts themselves. Sites like TechMeme do a great job of finding links between blog posts and giving heavily-linked posts more visibility. Aggregators can (but often don't) use these links in interesting ways. Three years ago, I wrote about my favorite feature of my preferred aggregator at the time (SharpReader) - threaded RSS. I would absolutely love to see this feature implemented in Google Reader, where I could navigate through my subscriptions by seeing what links the posts had in common... it would add tremendous value to the interface, and expose connections between posts that are otherwise all but impossible to glean from casual browsing.
FeedDemon fans will be happy to see that Nick Bradbury has added a pretty slick feature to the latest FeedDemon beta called "Popular Topics". Here's a screen shot from FeedDemon 2.5, showing one of the most-linked-to posts across my 200 subscriptions:
In addition, FeedDemon also shows you the most linked-to posts across the NewsGator Online user base, which is a great way to leverage the NewsGator community to surface interesting content you might not otherwise see.
My personal wishlist aside, the value of the full post is that it exposes the links between the posts in the feed and other posts out on the web. These links are sometimes (and, I predict, increasingly will be) leveraged by other services and applications, which can generate additional exposure for your content. Which is sort of why you're publishing a feed in the first place, right?
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| SFGate + FeedBurner = Summer of Burning Love |
| 2007-04-17 16:30:00 |
In a match made in distributed media heaven, the City by the Bay's leading newspaper has hooked up with the Windy City's one and only FeedBurner. SFGate, the online edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, has burned a few hundred feeds, blogs and podcasts, and is now contributing inventory to FeedBurner's ad network for blogs and RSS feeds.
“As one of the first major newspapers to have a Web presence in 1994, SFGate has maintained its commitment to offering valuable Internet services and we continue this tradition by improving the way we distribute news and information,” said Peter Negulescu, Vice President, Digital Media, SFGate.com. “FeedBurner’s analytics reveal a significant percentage of our readers consume content through our RSS feeds, so this deal signifies a logical extension of our overall content strategy. The online advertising revenue opportunity is very promising.”
As the number one newspaper site in Northern California, SF Gate delivers top news stories in addition to popular features such as The Daily Dish!, Mark Morford's Notes & Errata, Tech Talk, the Oakland A's and the San Francisco Giants feeds. Whether you're sittin' on the dock of the bay or sittin' on servers in Silicon Valley, SFGate has feeds for everyone. Far out!
SFGate has also added FeedBurner's groovy FeedFlare service to engage readers with links that make it simple to share individual entries. We like to make it easy to spread the love. Check out today's announcement for the whole story on the SFGate and FeedBurner partnership.
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| FeedBurner to Manage Feeds Across the AOL Network |
| 2007-04-13 18:00:00 |
FeedBurner will be working with AOL to manage hundreds of the company's RSS, podcast and video feeds consisting of news, sports and entertainment content. Additionally, all Time Warner properties including HBO, New Line Cinema, Time Inc. and Warner Bros. Entertainment can take advantage of FeedBurner's services. We like open floodgates around here, so long as the servers stay dry.
We'll be providing AOL with detailed analytics about how its content is consumed beyond the AOL Web site -- such as within widgets, in feed readers and on blogs -- to help them accurately measure influence wherever their content is consumed.
AOL joins a long list of established brands, including Dow Jones Online, Geffen Records, and USATODAY, who are using our super-powered FeedFoundry service, i.e, our enterprise-strength feed management offering for aggregating, analyzing and reporting distributed media activity across large numbers of RSS feeds. FeedFoundry allows publishers to monitor audience engageme...
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| FeedFoundry Gets More Features, Fans, and a Facelift |
| 2007-04-11 18:30:00 |
After some considerable engineering derring-do and successful settlement to a debate about using Celsius or Fahrenheit (contrarians that we are, we chose Kelvin), we are proud to announce a significant update to FeedFoundry, our industrial-strength feed management offering. FeedFoundry is currently humming away, minding the mass feed management details for over a hundred of FeedBurner's largest commercial publishers, retailers, and blog networks. This update puts more raw materials to good use for more robust feed management and analysis.
And while we're on the topic of shiny, new and just outta shrink wrap, NPR and Circuit City are the newest faces to join our distinguished list of FeedFoundry customers. NPR's Michael Yoch has this to say about FeedFoundry: "This service will provide new insights into how users are consuming NPR's distributed media on the Web. NPR users are avid consumers of RSS feeds. With FeedFoundry we'll be able to track this activity and make more informed con...
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| What's Up With That? Vol. 3: SEO |
| 2007-04-09 22:30:00 |
As we gear up for this week’s Search Engine Strategies conference in New York, we thought it timely to discuss the many ways in which feeds and the wonderful world of search engine optimization (SEO) intersect.
Increasingly, doing a search at a search engine will result in links to your feed as well as your site. This is a result of search engines’ increased use of feeds to help discover and index web sites, and is seen by many as an advantage in that it gives searchers multiple opportunities to find your content. Of course, some site owners want to control how (and when) their feeds show up in search results, as well as influence how the search engines interpret the information they find in the feeds. In order to better understand the issues, we keep in touch with representatives from the major search engines, and we also talk regularly with a number of leading SEO consultants. While a full SEO tutorial is outside the scope of this post, we wanted to at least outline the ways in ...
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