May 09, 2007
Google Reader for the Wii
A couple weeks with the Wii, and the number one use so far has been browsing on the TV. Actually, the kids have mostly used it to watch YouTube videos on our TV. It actually does a pretty good job of this.
Not I need more time browsing feeds - I think I do enough of that already - but if I wanted to, I could now use Google Reader's new controls to make this a lot easier to read feeds on the Wii.
The controls are as follows:
Google Reader can take advantage of the buttons on your Wiimote, letting you navigate easily from the comfort of your couch:
- up/down: scroll up/down
- right/left: next/previous item
- 1 button: show subscriptions
- 2 button: show links
When showing subscriptions:
- up/down: previous/next subscription
- right: select current subscription
- left: close
- -/+: collapse/expand folder
Yep, feeds are making it everywhere.
Posted by Steve at 09:40 AM | Comments (122) | TrackBack
April 26, 2007
ratified.org - ranking the Filipino blogosphere
Similar to what has been done in Spain and Italy, Andrew della Serna has created a ranking of the Phillipine blogosphere called Ratified.org using data from both Technorati and the FeedBurner Awareness API.
We love it when people do stuff like this. More and more publishers are realizing the value of a long term subscriber is worth as much if not more than other audience attention data points.
Salamat, Andrew.
Ratified.org The Philippines' Top 100 Blogs
Posted by Steve at 12:00 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
April 17, 2007
The hits keep on comin': AOL and SFGate + FeedBurner
Donldo Rodriguez Loeb is en fuego signing deals with AOL last week and now SFGate this week. It's great to see these large publishers continuing to adopt the entire suite of FeedBurner services. I've been speaking at a lot of conferences lately where it seems it's no longer a matter of if RSS will hit mass market proportions, it's publishers wanting to figure out how the can accelerate the adoption of their own publications (hint: don't hide a little button in the bottom right of your site). They know the when is now.
The rest of the publisher services team is cooking up some good stuff too. Their announcements coming soon!
Posted by Steve at 10:46 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 12, 2007
FeedFoundry rev 2
Congrats to Matt, Jessie and everyone else who have put together a stellar rev2 FeedFoundry - our analytics and management tool for commerical publishers. It looks fantastic. New stuff includes:
- Audience engagement measurement - Visual representation of item and clickthrough data across all feeds, providing publishers a snapshot of how their content is performing, and which feed traffic sources contribute the most daily activity. Warning: This never-before seen glimpse into distributed media engagement metrics may result in readership and revenue increase.
- Overall layout and organization improvements - We've improved the overall usability and responsiveness of FeedFoundry by grouping items into three simple and logical areas: Dashboard, Analyze, and Manage. An executive summary of key metrics sits up front and there should be no more knocking about for reports, muttering "Now, where did I put that?"
- FeedBurner-esque management features - Create networks, mass-manage and set up feed-to-email services, set up web site stats, and more.
read all about it at:
Burning QuestionsPosted by Steve at 10:18 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
March 01, 2007
Nokia N800: RSS y multimedia [via Xataka]
More and more devices are carrying RSS readers these days - check out this video of the Nokia N800. Love the music as well...I'm gonna be singing this song all day!
Video: Nokia N800 2
Link to Nokia N800: RSS y multimedia [via Xataka]
Posted by Steve at 01:41 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack
February 26, 2007
FeedBurner Japan Re-Launched
Whew! After quite a few long days and nights by both the Chicago and Tokyo teams, the relaunch of FeedBurner.jp is finally complete and up and running. Even though we launched the Japanese version of the site some time ago, we have been running on separate codebases for the last year, which really hasn't been any fun for anyone.
From a software development perspetive, this meant whenever we added a feature to FeedBurner.com, we had to manually copy over and test the code on FeedBurner.jp - which made it difficult if not impossible to keep the two sites n sync. This of course was one of those decisions made when we first launched to acheive the quickest time to market, knowing full well it come to bite us in the ass later.
Knowing that, we embarqued on a project quite some time ago to fully internationalize the FeedBurner website so it would become much easier to support the features in multiple languages on a going forward basis. Now when we add features, they can become available in any language we have a translation for almost immediately.
This new unified, internationalized codebase is the basis for FeedBurner.jp - and we will be making other languages available on FeedBurner.com really soon!
For now, you can enjoy all the services of FeedBurner in Japan whether you are a Blogger, a Podcaster, a Commercial Publisher, or an Advertiser.
So Kanpai! to Setsu and his entire team for working hard all weekend on this conversion. I certainly consider it a success!
Posted by Steve at 01:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 13, 2007
Google Mobile Proxy adds RSS/Atom Feed Discovery
If you use Google on a mobile phone browser, you may or may have not noticed that when you click on results, they send the result pages through a transcoding proxy, that is a server that tries to take regular web pages and format them for your mobile phone. Google's proxy has been around a long time, and continues to evolve.
Their latest innovation is great: if you browse to a page with an RSS or Atom feed, you get the option to immediately add that feed to Google Reader for mobile.
Pretend you search for this blog, for instance. You might see:
I could have felt lucky, but instead I just pick the first one, and there it is...this blog formatted for mobile, and at the top are my feeds.
If you click on one of those feeds, you go straigh to Google Reader.
Very cool.
Posted by Steve at 03:50 PM | Comments (47) | TrackBack
February 09, 2007
FeedBurner StandardStats Review
Another great FeedBurner Standard Stats Review, this one by Thomas McMahon. He also answers a question we get asked a lot - "Can I run both FeedBurner Standard Stats and Google Analytics?" The answer is unequivocally "Yes!" - and it's good to see the data reported by both is close - validating the accuracy of both services.
Posted by Steve at 10:49 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
February 08, 2007
FeedBurner Media Kit online
Congrats to our marketing and design teams who have done an absolutely bang-up job getting our FeedBurner Media Kit online.
I especially like the Channel Demographics and the Specs and Samples sections which we get asked about a lot.
Link to FeedBurner - FeedBurner Ads for Blogs and Feeds
Posted by Steve at 03:24 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
February 07, 2007
Future of Online Advertising Conference
Kudos again to Carson Systems, for really putting together an all-star speaking lineup for the FOOA conference later this year. Please put it on your list!
Here's the details:
The Future of Online Advertising
June 7/8 - NYC
http://www.futureofonlineadvertising.com
"A two day conference where the biggest names in online advertising show you how to increase ad revenue from your site, how to use your ad budget effectively and where the online advertising industry is headed."
Confirmed Speakers:
- Jeremy Allaire (Brightcove)
- Carla Hendra (Ogilvy)
- Greg Stuart (IAB)
- Matt Freeman (Tribal DDB)
- Steve Rubel (Edelman)
- Chas Edwards (Federated Media)
- Andrew Goodman (Page Zero)
- Steve Olechowski (FeedBurner)
- Michael Walrath (Right Media)
- Alyson Racer (New York Times)
Link to Future of Online Advertising
Posted by Steve at 01:18 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack
January 31, 2007
use FeedBurner, save $750 per month
nice:
Link to Painless Podcasting - Expert Help by PC Magazine
Posted by Steve at 02:17 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
January 27, 2007
Feedsparks - New Google Gadget for FeedBurner stats
For everyone who used to use my Google personalized home page gadget to get their FeedBurner stats, I now recommend using this one created by Bernie Thompson. It's a great mashup between the Awareness API and Sparklines, and does everything the old one did and more!
Posted by Steve at 07:43 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 17, 2007
米国No.1実績のRSS配信・管理・広告サービスFeedBurnerに注目！ | Web担当者Forum
This photoshoot was a lot of fun. Like most visits to Tokyo, it was straight out of Lost In Translation.
"More Intensity!"
More pictures in the links below. "No. 1 RSS FeedBurner" that's all you need to know. "Ichiban" means "Number 1" we heard it a lot.
Link to 米国No.1実績のRSS配信・管理・広告サービスFeedBurnerに注目！ | Web担当者Forum
Posted by Steve at 10:23 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 10, 2007
Matt's FeedBurner interview at Juxtaviews
We have a saying around here that your best comedy bang for your buck comes from saying what Shobe just said louder. This interview for the design community is no exception.
Link to Juxtaviews - » FeedBurner - Interview
Posted by Steve at 07:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 15, 2006
“Add This!” FeedFlare
The one thing I don't like about our FeedFlare service is that currently flares aren't very subscriber aware. As a publisher, I can choose if you can add to delicious, furl, fresqui, or magnolia, but I don't really know what your preference is. I might like Digg, you might like Netscape. And I don't really want 20 flares (until they are icons).
So i like the idea of adding 1 level of indirection to this process like AddThis.com has, at least until there is some support for this in the FeedFlare API out of the box.
You can add their personal flare here by using pasting this url:
http://www.addthis.com/feedflares/link.xml
Source: AddThis Blog » Blog Archive » “Add This!” FeedFlare For FeedBurner Users
Posted by Steve at 06:43 PM | Comments (1138) | TrackBack
December 14, 2006
RSS 2.0 Specification (version 2.0.8) ads
interesting that the RSS Advisory Board is buying AdSense ads to drive traffic.
here's a freebee:
Link to RSS 2.0 Specification (version 2.0.8)
Posted by Steve at 10:27 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack
Burning Questions • Blog Stats Rollout
Yep, as we announced in Burning Questions,we have begun the limited rollout of our Blog Stats offering that stemmed from the acquisition of BlogBeat from earlier in the year. I'm really excited to see this come to fruition and really impressed with the job the conversion team has done so far.
The best thing is, if you are already putting FeedFlare on your site, there's nothing else you have to do except check a box saying you want to get stats from your blog.
I'm already learning some cool things. For instance, a good chunk of readers are already hitting my blog with IE7:
i also really like the visitor detail.
So as of right now, we have Feed Stats, Blog Stats, and Ad Stats. Any guesses as to what could be next?????
Link to Burning Questions • Blog Stats Rollout
Posted by Steve at 08:26 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
December 13, 2006
Feedburner Graph - Joost de Valk
Just a follow-up on a post from a couple days ago regarding Joost deValk's FeedBurner stats widget - here's the one for this blog, and below is the link so that you can create your own!
Link to Feedburner Graph - Joost de Valk
Posted by Steve at 09:10 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
December 12, 2006
Le Collagiste VJ Headline Animator
Today's cool Headline Animator comes from Le Collagiste: 
Get yours at FeedBurner
Posted by Steve at 04:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
An official welcome to OSTG
Another great job by Rick to get these guys into the FeedBurner Ad Network.
Link to FeedBurner Delivering Feeds and Ads for Top-Ranked Technology Network
Posted by Steve at 09:27 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 11, 2006
Ogilvy Blog Feeds - Index of Influential Blogs
interesting list from Ogilvy PR.
Link to Ogilvy Blog Feeds - Index of Influential Blogs
Posted by Steve at 09:55 AM | Comments (611) | TrackBack
December 09, 2006
FeedFlare, it's not just for blogs anymore
FeedFlare in Newsweek.
Posted by Steve at 09:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
EA Mobile Games RSS feeds
Want to know when EA releases some new mobile games? never fear, they have some new RSS feeds just for this purpose. Please, subscribe:
EAMobileGames
Posted by Steve at 09:52 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
swim beyond the imagery
another custom headline animator.
Link to swim beyond the imagery
Posted by Steve at 09:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 07, 2006
Autopinger - Ping Health
Cool service that ranks ping health among the services that support it. There are more and more of these public shame sites popping up. GrabPERF is the other that comes to mind...
Link to Autopinger - Ping Health
Posted by Steve at 11:36 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
From the forums - Create a Scrolling Marquee w/ BuzzBoost
How to create a scrolling marquee with BuzzBoost, FeedBurner's way to redisplay feeds with JavaScript. Pretty cool!
Link to FeedBurner Support :: View topic - Create a Scrolling Marquee w/ BuzzBoost
Posted by Steve at 08:52 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
December 05, 2006
Dow Jones Online Selects FeedBurner to Manage and Monetize RSS and Podcast Feeds
Welcome Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch and Barrons! Raanan and team have been a pleasure to work with.
Enjoy some feeds:
What's News - US
Link to Dow Jones Online Selects FeedBurner to Manage and Monetize RSS and Podcast Feeds
Posted by Steve at 09:19 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
December 04, 2006
FeedBurner API fun - SEO and Web Design Blog - Joost de Valk
Wow, that's really cool. Gotta love great FeedBurner Awareness API uses.
Link to FeedBurner API fun - SEO and Web Design Blog - Joost de Valk
Posted by Steve at 09:40 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 03, 2006
NetWizz Jungle Blog - very cool Headline Animator
Alright, now the truly cool Headline Animator skins are starting to come out. this one is awesome. and in French!
Hopefully, our marketing people hold a contest or something, or have a gallery for the coolest examples on the FeedBurner website. Until then, I will continue to post the cool ones i find here.
Link to Feedburner : Headline Animator personnalisé - NetWizz Jungle Blog
Posted by Steve at 10:05 PM | Comments (28) | TrackBack
December 01, 2006
Headline Animator now Headlinier Animatorer
these are so much fun. here's a couple i made for my feeds:
Link to Burning Questions • Headline Animator Overhaul, Part I
Posted by Steve at 03:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 28, 2006
Adotas » FeedBurner Ad Inventory Grows 300%
I like this opening:
RSS feed management and advertising company FeedBurner has increased its customer base by 300% over the past six months, giving feed advertisers more than enough blog, news and website feeds to play with this holiday season.
ho ho ho.
Link to Adotas » FeedBurner Ad Inventory Grows 300%
Posted by Steve at 11:24 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 09, 2006
XandMail markets a mobile Podcasting solution
RSS is slowly making it's way to mobile. You know it when then companies that sell to mobile operators all start creating a solution for it. Having working in that arena for a long time, I'm sure in 2007, a bunch of these companies will be slugging it out in the RFP process with MNOs.
Like everything RSS related, the demand has to come from the consumers; and mobile is no exception. Since podcasting isn't a pure mobile technology (like SMS or MMS was/is) it will be a bit of a challenge for vendors to push such solutions, but when the subscribers start asking for it is when it will happen.
Will someone create the demand, or will the demand come as a natural progression of feeds and podcasts on the desktop?
As many of the latest devices all have on-board RSS readers and podcasting clients, the solutions will be built around legacy phone support, rich media transcoding, and network bandwidth optimization - all built on top of a top notch directory.
What remains to be seen is whether or not the operators will see distribution of content as competitive to their evolving rich media business models, or complimentary. There's an opportunity for them to view it as a complement, but I'll put my money on short-sightedness.
Link to XandMail, way more than messaging
Posted by Steve at 05:32 PM | Comments (14) | TrackBack
Microsoft has yet *another* RSS reader
The new Windows Live Mail Desktop Beta is pretty cool if you happen to have a hotmail account and want to integrate the rest of your mail easily with hotmail on your desktop. But the first thing you notice is the RSS feed reading experience. In fact, you can't miss it. It shares the feed store with IE7 and Outlook 2007 (if you have things so configured) but adds a river of news view if you are so enclined.
They are even so kind as to put related search results and sponsored listings right there for you. They haven't seemed to have caught as much shit for this as Newsgator.
Posted by Steve at 05:12 PM | Comments (3327) | TrackBack
November 08, 2006
Brazil: a campaign for full feeds
I spend a decent amount of time monitoring what is going on in the world of feeds and blogs outside of North America. Partially because it's an important part of running a global business, but I also find it interesting to get out of the protective plastic bubble of the U.S. blogosphere.
This week, there's a huge push among Brazilian bloggers to provide full feeds over partial feeds. They've even created a banner for this campaign that I think is great:
It says:
the "broken" feed icon with "Is this how you offer your feed? Help your reader. Offer your full feed."
At FeedBurner, we get asked about full versus partial feeds A LOT. Pretty much ALL the time. By both bloggers AND commerical publishers. All the commercial publishers want to do it, but no one wants to be the first. I think you will see commercial publishers start to do this in their "blogs" and eventually it WILL migrate to their news feeds.
So what's our line on this. Here's mine: Subscribers certainly prefer full feeds. For publishers, I've seen it time and time again - increasing your feed subscribers will increase your total traffic. Feed subscribers are a separate audience from people who visit the site. You need to grow both those audiences, and the total traffic back to your site will not decrease. Even if the percentage of people who click back to the site decreases, 10% of 1000 is greater than 50% of 100. get it?
http://www.brpoint.net/arquivo/2006/11/03/feeds-co...
and
Posted by Steve at 09:01 AM | Comments (29) | TrackBack
November 07, 2006
jargon watch: flog
flog - n. a fake blog, usually penned by a PR agency on behalf of a client.
Link to MediaPost Publications - Pro-Wal-Mart Travel Blog Screeches To A Halt - 10/12/2006
Posted by Steve at 10:17 AM | Comments (16) | TrackBack
MediaPost Publications: FeedBurner growing faster than Digg, MySpace, and Facebook
A pretty cool report from MediaPost via AdTech that lists FeedBurner (our brand police have put out an APB for the "B" in the quote below) as the fastest growing social networking site. Interesting to see us considered as an SNS. Certainly we are the plumbing that is powering all such things.
Social networking sites with the highest traffic growth included Feedburner (385%), Digg.com (286%), MySpace (170%), Wikipedia (161%), and Facebook (134%).
I went to a dinner last night at AdTech where there were a ton of people representing ad networks fighting for inventory. RSS is so different than that right now. It's much more of a land grab situation, except the land keeps expanding. Our FAN for sites finds new places to build on the existing terrirory, but FAN for feeds is really so much different than that. It's neat to be on the inside and see something happening that most people don't realize is happening.
Link to MediaPost Publications - Web 2.0 Growing Faster Than Online Video, News - 11/07/2006
Posted by Steve at 09:55 AM | Comments (430) | TrackBack
November 06, 2006
fox + feedburner = widgets
Donaldo says it best, so follow through on the link, but this is the first step in making it really easy for FeedBurner publishers to distribute widgets wherever. Great job on this deal, Don!
Link to donloeb.com » Blog Archive » get your branded feed-based widget here - fox plus feedburner
Posted by Steve at 05:25 PM | Comments (37) | TrackBack
November 02, 2006
Martín Varsavsky invests in Menéame
In a recent speaking gig in Spain, i had the pleasure to meet Ricardo Galli, an Argentinian, now living in Mallorca (Spain), who is the founder of Menéame, a website which is often described to me as "the Spanish Digg clone", but is also an open source platform where other communities can create their own little "Digg clones".
Menéame (which roughly translates to "shake me") has been a FeedBurner publisher for some time, and also a member of FeedBurner Ad Network in our Spanish language targeted ad channel. Early on they created a "send to Meneame" FeedFlare that can be found in such publications as Alt1040 and Xataka, and they publish that about 0.1% of their traffic comes from this FeedFlare. That may seem like a small number, but there are certainly secondary effects of this traffic that starts to snoball over time.
But there's a couple other things that interest me about Menéame - the first being the point above about it also being an open source platform.
There's as the time of this writing, 145 installations of this platform, in many different languages - most of which can be found here. There's all sorts of micro-communties forming here around this "Digg-like" software, which I think is pretty neat. At any rate, that type of takeup of a platform is pretty interesting.
The second thing is from their stats page, which shows traffic by country. That's a pretty large percentage of their traffic that is coming from the United States. This begins to show you how the Latin American population in the U.S. absolutely is involved in social media, and becomes a distinct segment in which to market.
At any rate, congrats Ricardo and Benjami on your financing - hopefully it helps you take this platform to the next level.
Link to Ricardo Galli, de software libre » La inversión de Martín Varsavsky en Menéame
Posted by Steve at 08:02 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
October 20, 2006
The beast has awoken; or, The beginning of Web 2.0 at FactoryCity [Chris Messina]
There's some pretty profound statements in here by Chris Messina. I like this post for a lot of reasons, but mostly because it is genuine, on the level, and there is absolutely no technology bigotry that could be present in this situation.
I personally have been using IE7 thoughtout its beta stages and upgraded to the final minutes after its release. Good stuff for the most part. It's become my most used feed reader for now.
Link to The beast has awoken; or, The beginning of Web 2.0 at FactoryCity
Posted by Steve at 07:56 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
October 14, 2006
Amazon aStore FeedBurner FeedFlare
Amazon Associates has a pretty cool new feature called aStore that allows you to create a store (get it? "aStore") really easily from products you select. Amazon is already on their second revision of this feature that allows bloggers to easily add recommended products to their blogs.
You can embed the aStore into your blog via an iframe, or just link to it. If you want to link to it, a FeedFlare is the perfect way to do this.
Here's how it looks, and it appears with every item in both the feed and my site:
The code for this is pretty simple. You can learn how to make your own flares here, and I recommend using the scratchpad which makes it super-simple to test. It is a static flare with the following example code:
<FeedFlareUnit>
<Description>See Products I recommend
</Catalog>
<FeedFlare>
<Text>See Products I recommend</Text>
<Link href="http://astore.amazon.com/persisteoptionsf"/>
</FeedFlare>
</FeedFlareUnit>
And you can probably just save your FeedFlare as a template with your blogging software. Templates are just files, after all.
Here's how you do that in Moveable Type:
Finally, to add it to your feed and site, you just need to go to http://www.feedburner.com and add it to your feed:
Enjoy!
Posted by Steve at 05:59 PM | Comments (45) | TrackBack
October 12, 2006
10 things i got wrong about FeedBurner
the pr machine is really cranking up here at FeedBurner, so much so that a good part of our week is now giving interviews, taking pictures, speaking at conferences, doing podcasts, and so much so that we've had to start saying no to a lot of these requests. gotta get some work done. invariably, being one of the founders, i get asked a lot about "web 2.0", what i think it means, "is there a bubble?" then there are a lot of questions about advice for other "web 2.0" entrepreneurs.
one piece of advice is "know your strengths and weaknesses. make sure you surround yourself with people who can supplement your weaknesses. admit when you are wrong and move on." i say that, because well, my weakness is that i'm not particularly good at predicting what or won't be successful from a software service perspective. when it comes to doing what is right for most users, i'm wrong a lot. luckily, my other cofounders are usually right about the things i'm wrong about.
surely, some of the things i have been wrong about were because in the early days of FeedBurner, i was cranky for sure. it was hard to fund the first year of a new venture ourselves (that is, before we closed our A round of venture financing), but clearly worth it in retrospect.
so what the hell are my strengths? i don't really know. people tell me i have a sixth sense. i see dead people. i guess when i'm in a room with someone, i can read their mind. that's useful in some situations.
anyway, here were some of the things i was wrong about in the creation of our business over the last 3 years (so far):
1. i didn't want to create an ad network, because i thought it wouldn't be fun - actually, creating an ad network has been pretty fun. making money is fun for sure, and building an ad network from scratch to optimize for this new medium of RSS feeds has been a great combination of technology and business, and obviously has is still evolving. mostly though, it's clearly the part of our business that where we are just miles ahead of any competitor in what we know, and in what we have planned. creating an ad network has made me learn a lot about how the media business works that i had never realized before, and i find it fascinating whenever i find out about a new ecosystem that you just never realized was there. and did i mention making money? watching the business start to really make some serious money is great fun. watching the average order multiply by a factor of 10 is exciting.
2. i thought RSS could be monetized by a micropayments mechanism charged to the subscriber. one of my original ideas was that we could create a micropayment marketplace for content where a subscriber got charged a fraction of a penny for reading rss content, we would take a small tax and handle the collection and settlement on the publisher's behalf. this may still evolve someday, but the RSS/Atom world is just still too fragmented to support this right now or for any forseeable future. there is no such thing as a private feed these days. you can search MyYahoo and find all sorts of private feeds out there if you know the right searches. how can you pay for something that gets immediately shared and becomes public? more than anything, i hate paying for anything. if a medium can support advertising to help subsidize its cost in a non-obtrusive way, fine. (Skype should figure this out for skype in/out internationally. I hate paying for Skype!)
3. i didn't think i wanted to code anymore. i remember telling the team "i'll do 'the RSS thing', but i just want to run business development". well, i kinda do that here, but i've been programming ever since my dad brought home a stolen IBM XT (he didn't steal it, but he bought it from someone who did - a better phrase would be "hot IBM XT") or perhaps when i got my Commodore Vic 20, so it was silly to think i wouldn't want to write code. so i still try to do that when i can. it helps me understand what we do a lot better. i wish i had more time to write code for feedburner.
4. i thought someone would create an open-source version of FeedBurner that could be installed locally and stifle our business. even if someone did this, and i fully expect that someone will create a something with similar features to what we offer sooner or later, it wouldn't matter. that's because the value of the business is in the scale and quality of the network of publishers and advertisers we've created, the efficiencies we gain by managing hundreds of thousands of feeds, and the absolutely rabid customer service and insight we've provided to all the users of our network over the last 2.5+ years. there's a lot of myopic skeptics out there that just don't get that. i won't expand on all of it here, but there's more and more features coming soon that can only be used by members of such a large, diverse network of publishers.
5. i thought publishers (bloggers mostly) would just modify their RSS templates to do a lot of what we do. a lot of what FeedBurner offers can be done by a blogger who modifies his/her blogging software, but it turns out it's a really, really small percentage of bloggers who actually have the know-how, the time, or desire to do this. some of that small percentage are in the vocal minority, so you hear a lot about that, but the reality is, most publishers don't want to modify the core in their templates beyond design. furthermore when it comes to advertising, there's a lot of good reasons not to modify your rss template - it's really hard to control the user experience to do such things as spacing out advertising in a user-friendly manner, or optimizing the impressions according to what the advertisers want. we've discovered quite a few things that you simply cannot do by modifying your template as well. just inserting a text link advertisement in your content is a really, really, bad idea. some bloggers will find this out the hard way.
6. i thought people would only want to get RSS as email. i remember telling Eric that i thought rss to SMTP was the killer application, and that i would never want feeds delivered any other way. boy was i wrong about that one. i still like getting RSS as email on my E61, mostly because the on-board RSS reader is so sucky, but otherwise, i much prefer getting RSS in a portal or homepage view, and it turns out so do most other people. not that feeds-as-email doesn't have its place. it's actually a pretty successful service we offer, but it's not the leader, and with the advent of RSS support in IE7, Outlook 2007, and Vista, it never will be.
7. i thought mobile takeup of RSS would happen a lot faster than it did. i still think rss is a killer app for mobile. the RSS integration on the SonyEricsson K790 / K800 is excellent. really excellent. (of course, i also think they stole some of their ideas from me and a project Matt and i did for Blogger) - but anyway, there still hasn't been a large intersection between the consumers of RSS and the people who have mass-market phones. this will change soon,
8. i thought we could use a third-party search marketing network in rss feeds. it turns out ads and ad networks optimized for search and contextual-content don't perform equally as well in feeds and blogs. this makes a lot of sense in retrospect. a) feed subscribers are a totally different audience than those people performing a search. they have a totally different intent. these are people you are reaching every day, not people who are performing a search looking to find something. b) you start splitting the pie too many ways, and no one is happy. building the FeedBurner Ad Network was the right choice. RSS advertising is a totally different animal than AdSense or YPN. we sell audience, not intent, to advertisers. this is a big difference most people don't get.
9. i didn't think i could work with the same co-founders and have a more successful company than our last company. the best analogy i can make with the FeedBurner founders is that of a rock band. now, which rock band is open to debate, but one thing holds constant: we all have complimentary skills that we add to every song. sometimes i play guitar, sometimes i play bass. we can all sing. i used to compare us to pearl jam, but i actually think we're a lot like the Beatles. we've certainly had our fallouts over the years for tons of reasons (actually, more similar to the Beatles than you might believe), but it pretty much always comes back together for something bigger and better. next we plan to travel to india, drop lots of acid, and see what happens.
10. i didn't think commercial publishers would adopt RSS so quickly. we kind of all expected commercial publishers to embrace RSS sometime around Q1 of 2006. the wave came much earlier than that. about six months earlier, in fact. i wish i could say this was serendipitous. if this were called "11 things i got wrong about FeedBurner", number 11 would be "i thought if we built it, they would come." now, that has certainly been true to a large extent. every week i look and see a commercial publisher you all know and had heard of convert their feeds to FeedBurner that my business development team has never talked to. it has happened a lot (in which case we start talking to them immediately!). but the vast amount of our publisher acquisition has been because of personal contact and lots of hard work. it also has to do with hiring the right people who have skills that i do not. i couldn't give a rat's ass about politics. i've never read the daily kos or instapundit. but Rick and Jake do and have, and guess what? political blogs are pretty popular. and they've got them all. i hate talking on the phone. i'm unable to process spoken audio without visuals. Don knows everyone and can spend all day on endless conference calls, thank God. Likewise, Eric Olson can cold call anyone and talk them into using FeedBurner, for the benefit of everyone involved. All that aside, my team has blitzkrieged the publisher market and it goes to show you that with the right talent and hard work, that you can accomplish the impossible.
next: 10 things we all got right with FeedBurner. hey, i'm not a total moron.
Posted by Steve at 10:15 PM | Comments (127) | TrackBack
October 03, 2006
FeedBurner Stats Google Gadget
Thanks to Google Gadgets, you can now get the FeedBurner stats widget for your own display purposes...
Link to Add Gadget to Your Webpage
Posted by Steve at 09:02 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
September 29, 2006
Chris Wetherell wearing a sportcoat?
Yep, it's big news that Google launched a new version of reader today. It's bigger news that "Chris" is wearing a sportcoat in his google reader video. Armageddon is coming soon.
Link to Official Google Reader Blog: Something looks... different.
Posted by Steve at 09:35 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack
September 28, 2006
Nice review of FeedBurner TotalStats
Neil Patel has a great review of the benefits of using TotalStats. Thanks Neil!
Link to What I learned from FeedBurner TotalStats
Posted by Steve at 01:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 22, 2006
VoiceIndigo: Podcasts Anytime, Anywhere
I saw a question on our forums today "How do I make my podcasts mobile?"
My answer was "go take a look at voiceindigo.com"
voiceindigo does indeed have some really cool tools for distributing your pocast via mobile. You register with them as a publishers, and they take care of transcoding your podcast, and chopping it up into chapters that are sized right for the subscriber's phone.
You don't need to install a thick client, but they offer that two for certain phones.
The have some great distribution tags you can put on your site as well.
Even if you are not a podcaster, but want to see how it works...check it out:
Link to VoiceIndigo: Podcasts Anytime, Anywhere
Posted by Steve at 09:05 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 20, 2006
My Name is Kate: Steve Olechowshi on RSS at Future of Web Apps
Thanks for taking notes, Kate. This is the best synopsis I have read of my presentation last week.
Link to My Name is Kate: Steve Olechowshi on RSS at Future of Web Apps
Posted by Steve at 09:16 AM | Comments (195) | TrackBack
September 18, 2006
Top FeedBurner Blogs in the Spanish Language
Following on the heels of my Top FeedBurner Blogs in Italy is this very related list. This list is managed out of Spain, but the blogging community across Spain and Latin America is very intertwined. Maybe more so than say, British and American blogs.
Julio Alonso of Weblogs, S.L. explains why (who I know pretty well) also likes this algorithm that the Italians used, except the FeedBurner rankings you see aboved are not used in the master rankings, as he doesn't want to penalize those who do not use FeedBurner.
Julio - keep in mind that many blogs are read more in the feed than on the web page! What's a better measure of popularity? a link, a random search, or a daily subscriber that comes back almost every day?
At any rate, personal lobbying aside, here's the list:
Posted by Steve at 07:46 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
September 15, 2006
Top FeedBurner Blogs in Italy
There's a great movement sweeping across Europe to come up with a clear and open way to rank blogs in those countries.
One of the latest and best comes out of Italy and is simply called Statistiche dei blog italiani. I'm pretty sure you can all translate that. see, Italian is easy.
I of course love that one of those ranking vectors is the popularity of their feed, as provided by the FeedBurner Awareness API, but they also use a lot of other data such as Alexa, Technorati, Yahoo, Google, etc.
FeedBurner's had support in Italiy since day 1. Literally, one of the editors of this project, Luca Conti, registered for FeedBurner on the first day we launched.
anyway, check it out:
http://top100.qix.it/metrics/feedburner/
Posted by Steve at 01:35 PM | Comments (339) | TrackBack
September 14, 2006
Video Game Console User-Agents
A few days ago, i posted on the distinct user-agents we see from Mobile phones, and just to further this point that RSS is making it to more an more places, I decided to do another internal query to see how the takeup has been on video game consoles.
The results aren't too surprising - the leaders are also a mobile device, and particulary the podcast clients for the Sony PSP.
For those who haven't used the "Sony PSP Native RSS Reader" - it's really only a podcasting client. If you add a text feed, it just reports that there are no feed items. But it's great for video podcasts.
If you have a PSP, try watching Ask A Ninja: http://feeds.feedburner.com/askaninja
| user_agent | Circulation |
| Sony PSP Native RSS Reader | 458933 |
| Mozilla/4.0 (PSP (PlayStation Portable); 2.00) | 158234 |
| PSP" Media Manager | 29283 |
| Media Manager for PSP" | 2779 |
| Media Manager for PSP® | 110 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (PSP WiFi Cluster running Blue Gene emulator) | 62 |
| LinksBoks/0.99 (Xbox; d3dx) | 53 |
| BX14RSSR/1.0 (PSP/2.6.0) | 43 |
| Mozilla/4.0 (PSP (PlayStation Portable); 2.00),gzip(gfe) (via translate.google.com) | 41 |
| Sony Playstation2 (Utility Disc Ver.2.00b/for PS-modem)[jp] | 36 |
| SCEJ PSP BROWSER 0102pspNavigator | 14 |
| Missing Sync/Sony PSP (Macintosh; U; Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418 (KHTML, like Gecko) | 13 |
| Mozilla/4.0(PSP (PlayStationPortable); 2.00) | 7 |
| SCEJ PSP BROWSER 0110 UCJS10010 | 7 |
| Mozilla/4.0+(PSP+(PlayStation+Portable);+2.00) | 6 |
| Mozilla/4.0 (PSP; (PlayStation Portable);; 2.00; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; InfoPath.2) | 5 |