Ari Herzog (@ariherzog) is a social media strategist to business and government, and an online journalist. He writes about new media and online marketing at ariwriter.com. I run into a brick wall when attempting to share RSS feeds with friends of mine who don’t use feed readers. While I can create a Google Reader shared view, that’s only for selected posts, not entire feeds. It’s not much better with Alltop and Popurls where content is moderated and hand-picked by someone else. Individurls solves that problem by combining the layout of Popurls with the manual feeding of Google Reader. “I wanted...
Every once in a while we show some of the stats about the feed readers people are using to access TechCrunch content. Since we recently passed a million daily RSS readers, now is a good time for a new update. In June 2006 Firefox, Bloglines and Newsgator were the three largest readers, in that order. Feedburner did an analysis later in 2006 with similar results. Long ago Google reader eclipsed all of those readers. And recently, Outlook has surged as the feed reader of choice. Of our roughly 1.4 million RSS readers, 520,000, or about 38%, come from Outlook. 390,000,...
“Why do bloggers put so much focus upon growing RSS subscriber numbers to their blog if most of them only ever read your content in Feed Readers and don’t visit your blog?” This question (or variations of it) hit my inbox 3 times in 24 hours from different people so I thought I’d tackle it as a post instead of individual replies. Let me start by saying that this problem can be frustrating. You see your RSS subscriber number growing by your actual visitor numbers remain steady - as do your comment numbers. It can actually feel like you’re wasting...
Within the realm of blogging, there are some arguments that seem to go on forever. Whether or not one should use partial or full RSS feeds happens to be one of those arguments. Those in favor of partial feeds usually argue that this prevents duplicate content from showing up on blogs who scrape their content. Based on previous experience and from monitoring the debate across multiple blogs, I'd say that this has become a moot point. For starters, you can't catch everyone who is ripping off your content. Secondly, you will not get penalized for having duplicate content because it...
What do Google Reader engineers read? by Mike Knapp @ Google (MAKE is on the list, woo!)... He writes... We are all passionate feed readers on the Google Reader team. For us, working on Reader is a dream job. Why? Because we have the perfect excuse when we're caught browsing feeds at work! For a bit of fun, and to show you what we like reading, we've put together a bundle of our favorite feeds. After much deliberation, we've narrowed down our "Staff Picks" to the following: Cute Overload (view in Reader) Design Milk (view in Reader) Dinosaur Comics...
If you’re a web addict like myself, you’ll likely have a Twitter account, a filled-to-capacity RSS feed reader - or both. I take any chance that I can to cut down on the number of information sources which my OCD self must check per day. It hit me not too long ago that with the right tools, I can turn my Twitter home page and my Twitter client into a feed reader. For purposes of this piece, I’m going to assume that you have a working knowledge of both the Twitter service and RSS feeds. If not, check out Aibek’s primer...
Users who hadn’t already left Bloglines for Google Reader and other functional RSS readers are doing so now, largely because Bloglines has stopped working and the company has done absolutely nothing to communicate to users what is going on or when it might be fixed. Even Bloglines founder Mark Fletcher, who sold the company to Ask.com in 2005, is ready to jump ship. In a Twitter message yesterday he said “Bloglines, please stop sucking. It’s been a couple weeks now. I don’t want to have to move to Google Reader. Sigh.” The problem is that Bloglines isn’t updating feeds...
The crowded world of online RSS feed readers is one that's been dominated by names like Google Reader, Bloglines and Netvibes. But underneath that layer you have a few interesting innovative players, including FeedEachOther, and Shyftr. Shyftr came to prominence this spring, drawing attention for a shared comment stream on linked items, and has been quiet for the last few months as they worked on enhancing their platform. Today, they woke up in a big way, revamping the service, while adding an API, activity streams and widgets for bloggers.Shyftr's main draws continue to be the same. You can add friends...
Many tech savvy Internet users love RSS news feeds to keep up to date with the latest articles and news of their favorite websites. Unlike bookmarks however RSS news feeds cannot be checked for dead sites that do not get updated. Rarst posted a process on his own website that makes it possible to check all feeds for dead links. The process can be broken down to exporting all feeds in an opml file, extracting the links into a new text file and checking the links with a link checker. Some feed readers might provide an easier way of discovering...
words and pictures by Brian Solis Blogworld Expo exceeded all of my expectations this year and it already has scores of bloggers planning their 2009 trip to Las Vegas - including me. Stephanie Agresta and I were asked to host a Techset event in honor of attending bloggers to celebrate their achievements, connect each other, place names to faces, and also meet new contacts to place on our radar and in our feed readers. Because of you and your accomplishments, we were inspired to organize something very special, something that truly captured the spirit of the blogsphere and the relationships...
The 20th century news and stock ticker used to be one of the most archetypal images of newsrooms all around the world. It was timely and exciting, if a bit impersonal, for editors to watch the wires for breaking news from the big news syndicates and select stories to run in the local paper. That ticker doesn't print everything out any more, though, and a constant stream of news is something that millions of consumers now see for themselves inside their RSS feed readers. How are newspapers adapting to digital syndication? Today the Associated Press announced that more than 500...
Blogger has recently released a feature that lets you publicly subscribe to other blogs. Google calls this "following" and you can only follow blogs powered by Blogger, at least for now."Do you have a favorite blog and want to let the author and readers know that you are a fan? Well now you can do that and more with the Blogger Following feature," explains the help center.Bloggers can add a widget that lists the people who follow a blog. Visitors can follow a blog from the widget and see their subscriptions in Blogger's dashboard or in Google Reader.In most feed...
Today we are having the first day of fall and no matter how sad it may be for some of us to welcome this rainy season, September will sure be a very exciting and busy month for everyone in the technology blogosphere. The main reason is that we are going to have four (!!!) major industry events this month with dozens of new projects launched and - hopefully - lots of interesting ideas and discussions to witness. The first two (those surrounded with the most buzz) are DEMO and the competing TechCrunch 50. Both events will take place in California...
You might have noticed some blogs publishing partial RSS feeds. How do you feel when you have to click on that additional link( Read the full story..) in your RSS reader in order to read the full post? Well, if you ask me, such partial RSS feeds are very painful and annoying to me. Full text feeds can help in generating higher revenues for bloggers if they realize the power of full text feeds. The reason why some bloggers don’t publish the full feeds is the fear of loosing revenue. Bloggers who are not facilitated with adsense for RSS...
