Feedburner - ReadWriteWeb http://www.readwriteweb.com/feeds/tag/Feedburner en Copyright 2009 Richard MacManus readwriteweb@gmail.com Tue, 24 Nov 2009 09:04:58 -0800 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/?v=4.23-en http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss FeedBurner and Google Analytics: Together at Last google_feedburner_logo_nov09.pngAfter years of waiting, FeedBurner users can finally see their stats in Google Analytics. Google acquired FeedBurner in 2007. Since then, there has been a lot of grumbling about how Google handled the transition and the lack of innovation in FeedBurner since the acquisition. The integration with Google Analytics is still hidden and incomplete - right now you can only see feed item click data - but Google promises to slowly add more data in the coming weeks.

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]]> Subscriber count - the one statistic that many bloggers are most interested in - is not part of this current integration. Right now, you can only see data about the traffic that your feeds brought to your site.

feedburner_analytics_stats.png

How to See these Stats

Getting to this data isn't easy, though. First of all, you have to use AdSense for feed or FeedBurner to track this data. Then, in Google Analytics, you have to go to Traffic Sources and click on All Traffic Sources. After this, you still have to filter your traffic by entering 'feedburner' in the search box at the bottom of the page. In the Campaigns view you can also filter stats by 'feedburner.'

In today's announcement, Google explains how to customize the way FeedBurner tags clicks it sends to Google Analytics. Google plans to create more endpoints for FeedBurner data in the near future.

More to Come

FeedBurner users will be happy to hear that Google plans to release more features in FeedBurner that will take advantage of this new functionality in the coming weeks. FeedBurner had been lying dormant for quite a while. Today's announcement hopefully signals the end of this stage in FeedBurner's development.

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http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/feedburner_and_google_analytics_together_at_last.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/feedburner_and_google_analytics_together_at_last.php News Fri, 13 Nov 2009 09:30:17 -0800 Frederic Lardinois
Report: Feedburner Is Available 99.94% of the Time feedburner_logo_may09.pngAccording to a new report from website monitoring service Pingdom, Feedburner had an uptime of 99.94% over the last two months. Feedburner, which a lot of publishers use to manage their feeds and get usage statistics, was acquired by Google in 2007, and even though Google has kept the service running, a lot of users have been unhappy with various aspects of the service. With a 99.94% uptime, though, there is good evidence that the core function of the service, making feeds available, stands on solid ground - which, of course, we would expect from a service that runs on Google's servers.

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]]> According to Pingdom, most of the outages were very short, with the longest lasting just 13 minutes, and most lasting just around a minute (Pingdom checked its feed once a minute for this report).

Pingdom also reports that the average loading time for the Pingdom feed was about 0.8 seconds, which has gradually improved since March. Overall, this number might be a good indication for the health of the Feedburner service, but for most users, 0.8 seconds will probably mean very little, as it often takes Feedburner 15 minutes or more to even update a feed with a new post.

feedburner_loadtime_may09.png

The Feedburner service has definitely had its fair share of problems, including major issues with the stats it reports, but uptime was never really Feedburner's most pressing problem. On our personal blogs and here at RWW, we have often seen that Feedburner would not respond to pings or took far too long to update our feeds.

While we have seen a few startups in this space, including FeedBlitz and Feedsqueezer, for most bloggers Feedburner is still the de-facto standard for managing their RSS feeds. And while it is nice to see that Google is doing a good job at keeping it up and running, it would be nice to see some general fine-tuning of the service. Even Google is now getting into the real-time web, and RSS feeds, which used to feel like a very speedy and efficient way to subscribe to information, but now are starting to feel rather slow.

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http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/report_feedburner_uptime_may.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/report_feedburner_uptime_may.php News Wed, 13 May 2009 08:08:38 -0800 Frederic Lardinois
Could FeedBurner Be Replaced by PostRank.com? (Redux) RSS analystics service PostRank.com is putting out a call to feed publishers for feature requests for a new service that will aim to replace the near-dead FeedBurner. The company's initial proposal looks far, far cooler than anything FeedBurner ever did - but after a Google acquisition turned Feedburner from every blogger's best friend into an unreliable annoyance, it's hard not to be cynical.

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]]> Editor's note: During 2009 there have been some posts on ReadWriteWeb that didn't get the attention they perhaps deserved - because of timing, competing news stories, etc. So we're starting up our Redux series again, to re-publish some of those hidden gems. This is one of them, we hope you enjoy (re)reading it!

PostRank is one of our very favorite services on the web today. Give it any RSS feed and the service will give you a filtered feed of just the most commented on, linked to, saved and Dugg posts from that feed. It's really handy, so we're excited to see what the company can do moving more seriously into the feed publishing and analytics market. Can PostRank pull it off? Below we discuss reasons why they may or may not be able to do so.

postrank11.jpgWe use PostRank every day here at ReadWriteWeb, for everything from finding the weirdest stuff on the internet to tracking the hottest conversation among GenY, semantic web or mobile blogs.

The company says it "will be releasing a collection of products over a period of the next six months related to [feed analytics]: helping publishers and readers discover topic experts and measure their influence, engagement analytics (social media analytics), real-time tracking and other tools to help publishers and readers find and read what matters."

PostRankScreen10.jpg

Can They Pull it Off?

The main asset PostRank has going for it is that there's a very clear value proposition. We've found that it takes one sentence to explain what this service does and nearly anyone who uses RSS immediately grasps the value of the application and wants it. That's quite remarkable considering how hard it is to explain most things about RSS.

FeedBurner got huge piles of users by saying "go through us and we'll tell you how many RSS subscribers you have." PostRank can tell potential users "go through us and we'll tell you what your hottest posts are, who the most loved writers are in your field, and what topics are burning up the charts." And hopefully, how many subscribers you have.

The Challenges PostRank Will Face

There are a lot of challenges that PostRank will face in trying to replace FeedBurner.

Will Google Reader, now the dominant RSS reader by far, report subscriber numbers to PostRank? FeedBurner requires RSS readers to report numbers daily, something that doesn't always work. Now that FeedBurner is owned by Google, will they hand over their huge part of the numbers to a competitor?

Far more processing power is required to count comments, inbound links, etc. for every blog post in an RSS feed. When PostRank came out with a Google Reader and Newsgator plug-in, for example, it limited its filtering to just the most popular 1,000 blogs on the web.

It's more complicated to evaluate "social media engagement" than it is subscribers, and evaluating subscribers is fairly complicated itself. How many people are still mystified by the way FeedBurner numbers rise and fall daily, or by the obtuse "reach" metric that FeedBurner now emphasizes? Similarly, PostRank appears fairly transparent on the surface, but a closer look at their metrics leaves us feeling more in the dark than we'd like to be.

It hasn't been a bump-free ride so far, either. Some issues encountered so far include; finding feed URL irregularities, catching strategies that didn't work out, and server troubles. As a result, we find ourselves contacting PostRank on a regular basis to report problems. We also subscribe to the feed of their GetSatisfaction forum and we know we're not the only ones. In their defense, the company has raised more money lately so they could be better prepared for the load. This author also used PostRank on a major public production for a large consulting client 6 months ago and that worked quite well.

Finally, will publishers trust another 3rd party feed publishing service to stand between them and their readers? Some blogs have reported no problems of late with FeedBurner, but a quick search on Twitter shows that many others have.

We're excited to see what PostRank can do, though. If you are too, then drop by the company's new Feed Analytics page and share your ideas and feature requests for a feed analytics service of the future.

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/could_feedburner_be_replaced_by_postrankcom_redux.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/could_feedburner_be_replaced_by_postrankcom_redux.php RSS & Feed Management Sun, 05 Apr 2009 15:00:00 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick Could FeedBurner Be Replaced by PostRank.com? RSS analystics service PostRank.com is putting out a call to feed publishers for feature requests for a new service that will aim to replace the near-dead FeedBurner. The company's initial proposal looks far, far cooler than anything FeedBurner ever did - but after a Google acquisition turned Feedburner from every blogger's best friend into an unreliable annoyance, it's hard not to be cynical.

PostRank is one of our very favorite services on the web today. Give it any RSS feed and the service will give you a filtered feed of just the most commented on, linked to, saved and Dugg posts from that feed. It's really handy, so we're excited to see what the company can do moving more seriously into the feed publishing and analytics market. Can PostRank pull it off? Below we discuss reasons why they may or may not be able to do so.

]]>Sponsor

]]> postrank11.jpgWe use PostRank every day here at ReadWriteWeb, for everything from finding the weirdest stuff on the internet to tracking the hottest conversation among GenY, semantic web or mobile blogs.

The company says it "will be releasing a collection of products over the period of next six months related to [feed analytics]: helping publishers and readers discover topic experts and measure their influence, engagement analytics (social media analytics), real-time tracking and other tools to help publishers and readers find and read what matters."

PostRankScreen10.jpg

Can They Pull it Off?

The main asset PostRank has going for it is that there's a very clear value proposition. We've found that it takes one sentence to explain what this service does and nearly anyone who uses RSS immediately grasps the value of the application and wants it. That's quite remarkable considering how hard it is to explain most things about RSS.

FeedBurner got huge piles of users by saying "go through us and we'll tell you how many RSS subscribers you have." PostRank can tell potential users "go through us and we'll tell you what your hottest posts are, who the most loved writers are in your field and what topics are burning up the charts." And hopefully, how many subscribers you have.

The Challenges PostRank Will Face

There are a lot of challenges that PostRank will face in trying to replace FeedBurner.

Will Google Reader, now the dominant RSS reader by far, report subscriber numbers to PostRank? FeedBurner requires RSS readers to report numbers daily, something that doesn't always work. Now that FeedBurner is owned by Google, will they hand over their huge part of the numbers to a competitor?

Far more processing power is required to count comments, inbound links, etc. for every blog post in an RSS feed. When PostRank came out with a Google Reader and Newsgator plug-in, for example, it limited its filtering to just the most popular 1,000 blogs on the web.

It's more complicated to evaluate "social media engagement" than it is subscribers, and subscribers is fairly complicated itself. How many people are still mystified by the way FeedBurner numbers rise and fall daily, or by the obtuse "reach" metric that FeedBurner now emphasizes? Similarly, PostRank appears fairly transparent on the surface, but a closer look at their metrics leaves us feeling more in the dark than we'd like to be.

It hasn't been a bump-free ride so far, either. Feed URL irregularities, caching strategies that didn't work out, server troubles - we find ourselves contacting PostRank on a regular bases to report problems. We also subscribe to the feed of their GetSatisfaction forum and we know we're not the only ones. In their defense, the company has raised more money lately and so could be better prepared for the load. This author also used PostRank on a major public production for a large consulting client 6 months ago and that worked quite well.

Finally, will publishers trust another 3rd party feed publishing service to stand between them and their readers? Some blogs have reported no problems of late with FeedBurner, but a quick search on Twitter shows that many others have.

We're excited to see what PostRank can do, though. If you are too, drop by the company's new Feed Analytics page and share your ideas and feature requests for a feed analytics service of the future.

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/postrankcom_aims_to_replace_feedburner.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/postrankcom_aims_to_replace_feedburner.php Blogging Mon, 26 Jan 2009 11:57:53 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick Why We're Desperately Awaiting Feedsqueezer When the RSS management company Feedburner was acquired by the internet goliath Google back in May of 2007, some people were excited, others were concerned. On the one side, there was hope that putting Google's weight behind the struggling service would improve the speed with which feeds were updated. Plus, there would be the option to put AdSense in feeds, which pleased some publishers. Others, however, felt that that the move gave Google too much power over the syndication marketplace.

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]]> One of the people concerned was Dave Winer, one of the world's first bloggers and an RSS pioneer. At the beginning of this month, he posted a link to Feedsqueezer, a Feeburner competitor that may end up being the only viable option we'll have when it comes to feed management. Though he didn't provide any context for the link, we found it interesting as well.

feedsqueezer.png

Feed Management: The Internet Monopoly

Surprisingly, feed management is one service where there aren't a million different options available. Unlike Web 2.0 sites like Twitter and Friendfeed, whose competitors are plentiful and varied, FeedBurner stands alone. Years ago there was Feedpass, but it never got off the ground. These days, as Allen Stern just noted on CenterNetworks, the only other viable option is Pheedo, a service that offers basically the same services as FeedBurner, but also seems to come with the same set of issues: feeds don't update too quickly, much less in real-time.

Obviously, this lack of true competition is a giant, gaping hole that everyone is waiting for someone to fill. That's why we have our eyes pinned on Feedsqueezer service, hoping that something will come of it.

Feedsqueezer, the Upcoming Alternative to FB

Today, the Feedsqueezer homepage is nothing more than a promise of what's to come: a feed management platform that delivers analytics, SEO, feed re-distribution, content delivery, and more. There's a quiet Twitter account and an unused GetSatisfaction page set up for the service. The one employee representing the service there is "gadgetboy," aka John Federico, a marketing and business development representative whose prior experience includes serving as VP of Marketing for BlogTalkRadio, Senior Strategist for IconNicholson, Sr. Director of podcasting for Audible, Inc., and more.

The only clue we have to Feedsqueezer's progress is yesterday's one (and only) tweet that announces "getting schooled in all things EC2," a reference to Amazon's "Elastic Compute Cloud" service where it appears Feedsqueezer will be hosted.

At least a day old tweet appears to be progress. Now, more than ever, publishers need a real alternative to Feedburner. Anyone interested in signing up for the beta can do so from the Feedsqueezer homepage. Who knows? It's worth a shot.

Update: We mistakenly reported that FeedSquuezer was Winer's own project in our initial coverage. Winer is in fact not associated with the service in any way and we apologize for the error in reporting. The confusion resulted from his statement on his blog: "I also volunteer to help get a Feedburner competitor on the air...update:Feedsqueezer."

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http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/why_were_desperately_awaiting.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/why_were_desperately_awaiting.php Products Fri, 23 Jan 2009 07:08:54 -0800 Sarah Perez
FeedBurner Quits Blogging, Gets Eaten by AdSense feedburnerlogo.jpgRSS and podcast publishing service FeedBurner has been a great friend to bloggers over the years but this morning announced that it will shut down its own blog Burning Questions. Readers will now be referred to a new blog, AdSense for Feeds. FeedBurner is so useful for so many things beyond serving up ads in feeds that there's something sad about the symbolism here.

As a part of the announcement FeedBurner offers information for publishers about how to migrate from FeedBurner to a new Google account, as in the future all feed related services will require a Google account. It's the end of an era, really.

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]]> fbshirt.jpg
Nice advertising t-shirt, sucker.
FeedBurner was acquired by Google in the Summer of 2007. People have criticized it for taking an unhelpful amount of control away from publishers, for failing to update publishers regarding ping processes for updates, and the Chinese government saying that FeedBurner was just plain unwelcome anywhere in the country.

Still, for everything from analytics, to nice clean easily transferable URLs and accounts, to email subscriptions and adding links into the body of feeds - FeedBurner has been great.

Now it appears to be subsumed by AdSense. Maybe that will mean it will get more attention and updates than it has since the acquisition. Maybe that will mean there are more ads in feeds. Either way, just as so much of the art and communication world now lives in the shadow of advertising and PR, it's sad to see feed publishing now wholly under the umbrella of Google's massive advertising business.

Photo: "Spreading the FeedBurner love," CC by Flickr user 37hz

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/feedburner_quits_blogging_gets_eaten_by_adsense.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/feedburner_quits_blogging_gets_eaten_by_adsense.php Blogging Tue, 23 Dec 2008 11:56:19 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick Top 10 RSS and Syndication Products of 2008 RSS and syndication are the veins that the new social web flows through. Countless products and services have been built on top of RSS in the past few years but there are always a few that stand above the rest.

As part of this year's Top 10 Products series, we offer below the Top 10 RSS and Syndication Products of 2008. These are the feed tools we and the people we know use day in and day out - we love them, we hate them, we wouldn't want to work without them.

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]]> This is the fourth in our series of top products of 2008:

  1. Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008
  2. Top 10 International Products of 2008
  3. Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2008

Mashery

About the Selections

These aren't all new products from 2008. They are the products in the RSS and syndication world that we think made the biggest impact or were the most useful.

To be honest, this was not a particularly good year for innovation in the RSS space. Too many of the products listed below are incumbents, several of which drove us crazy this year. They remain on the list, however, because they are incredibly useful and nothing topped them.

Some honorable mentions are deserved as well. We talked to many people who like RSS magazine-style start page Feedly, though we found it overly constrictive and don't feel that it's made a big market splash yet. We also found the Associated Press's AP Member Marketplace very interesting. Had we gotten a chance to get to know it better, it could very well have been on this list. Finally, we love African social media aggregator Afrigator - it's a great way to learn about what's happening all over the continent and it's a great use of RSS. We named it one of the Top 10 International Products of 2008 but we think it deserves an honorable mention in this category as well.

And Now the RWW Top 10 RSS and Syndication Products of 2008

Postrank

postrankimage.jpgFormerly known as AideRSS, Postrank is simply the most useful RSS related application we've seen in a long time. Plug in any RSS feed and Postrank will rate each item in the feed on a scale of 1 to 10, by number of comments, inbound links, saves in Delicious, etc. You can then subscribe to a filtered feed of just the 10% most popular items in that feed.

We use Postrank all the time, in all kinds of contexts: from monitoring break-out stories in niche markets we don't follow closely, to finding out about the bread and butter of new blogs we discover to running search feeds through Postrank to surface hot conversations on any topic.

Postrank has been around for about a year and a half, but we write about it over and over again.

This year Postrank opened an API, made a bunch of deals with other companies, improved its service, raised a round of funding and just generally rocked.

FriendFeed

Social "life streaming" service FriendFeed is making syndication a more social activity than anything else has yet. The service aggregates your activity data from all around the web, lets your friends comment on it and shows you the activities of all your friends' friends when someone you know comments on something and exposes it to their network.

friendfeedRWWroom.jpgIf RSS readers will change your life and work through their awesome usefulness, FriendFeed is a service that makes syndication fun. It's one of the first places we go on the web every morning.

We interviewed the ex-Googlers who founded FriendFeed last February and that interview is still the best place to learn how the service works under the hood.

If you'd like to connect with the ReadWriteWeb crew on FriendFeed (and we hope you will) we've posted a tour of our FriendFeed profile pages here. Please join us also in the ReadWriteWeb FriendFeed Room.

Gnip

Gnip is a social media ping server, a service that other services ask for user data updates from all around the web. There's nothing here for users, but almost every developer we talk to these days who is aggregating content in order to add value to it (and that is the name of the game) has Gnip on its radar. The company aims to make aggregation more timely, scalable and efficient than it is today.

We wrote about Gnip at length when the service launched in July.
gnipscreen3.jpg

Snackr

snackrscreen5.jpgSnackr is a simple little RSS ticker built in Adobe AIR. Its frenetic and unstopping delivery of news is too much for many people, but the rest of us love it. It's where our eyes wander during page loads and other down times. Many of the stories you read here at ReadWriteWeb were based on things we first caught wind of through Snackr.

Snackr was built in-house at Adobe by Flex team member Narciso Jaramillo. We reviewed it in May and have been using it ever since.

Google Reader

Google Reader is the market leader in full featured RSS readers, having pulled ahead of the troubled Bloglines in recent months. This year Google Reader has made their sharing feature much more transparent, added the ability to translate any feed into a number of different languages and recently redesigned.

It hasn't been a super exciting year for the product, and there are still basic problems like very infrequent caching of rare feeds, but Google Reader's incredible dominance in the field makes it a required part of this list.

Google Reader RSS Subscriber Count Greasemonkey Script

greasemonkeyscriptgreader.jpgOne of the simplest little changes we've made to our browsers lately is the addition of this greasemonkey script that shows the number of readers in Google Reader that any page's RSS feed has. You can usually multiply that number by 2 to 4 times for an estimate of how many total readers a feed has across all readers, but either way it's a great little indication of a site's popularity.

The script was written by an anonymous user named "uncv" and we'd like to thank them. We love what they've done! This was one of the 7 coolest browser tweaks from the last month that we wrote about earlier this week. It's already won a permanent place in our hearts!

Dapper

Dapper.net is a point and click interface for data extraction - a nice way to say scraping an RSS feed. We continue to depend on Dapper for all kinds of research, we're always finding new ways to use it around here. We love it.

dapperscreen2008.jpg

Unfortunately, some sites don't like us to have access to links back to them available in our RSS readers (like Facebook, for example) and that really upsets us. In many cases those feeds that we created ourselves are the only way we'd be drawn back to a site, so it's their loss as much as ours.

Dapper has been around since 2006, but they recently launched a semantic ad platform that we included in our list of the top 10 semantic web products of 2008.

Twitterfeed

twitterfeedscreen.jpgLove it or hate it, Twitterfeed has made a big impact on the web in 2008. It's the service people use to publish an RSS feed right into Twitter.

Some people argue that twitter is all about conversation and that publishing an RSS feed there is grating and inappropriate. We like getting our local newspaper story links on Twitter, though, and everything from disaster monitoring to traffic conditions are now available via Twitterfeed.

Feedburner

Google's RSS publishing service Feedburner hurt our ability to break news first, can't be used in many corporate environments because it gets blocked in China and only made 6 posts all year to its company blog, none since May. That's compared to 28 posts in 2007. Apparently once you get your Google money there's not much point in communicating with the people who depend on you every day.

Why would we call Feedburner one of the top 10 RSS products on the year then? Because despite how frustrating it can be, the service is still so incredibly useful that we don't know what we'd do without it. Not just for publishing and analytics for ReadWriteWeb feeds - from numbers to email delivery to FeedFlare links, Feedburner will work magic easily on any feed you work with. I've got 68 different feeds in my account and I'll probably publish several more before the year is up.

Pipes

Yahoo! Pipes is another RSS based service that is really frustrating, hasn't innovated substantially in the last year - but is still so powerfully useful that it deserves a spot as one of the top products in this market.

Splicing and filtering RSS feeds is the simplest thing to do with Pipes, but there's much more you can do with it as well. It's great for us pseudo-geeks, we can work all kinds of magic with it. We've used Pipes throughout the year to do things that we (ok I) don't have the technical chops to do otherwise. For that I thank the Pipes team a whole lot.

PipesScreen2008.jpg

Those Were Our Favorites This Year - How About You?

Did we miss anyone you think should have been on this list? We hope you'll share your favorites in comments below. What RSS and syndication products impacted you the most in 2008?

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_10_rsssyndication_products_of_2008.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_10_rsssyndication_products_of_2008.php 2008 in Review Thu, 11 Dec 2008 15:30:30 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick FeedBurner May Not Be Hearing Your Pings Feedburnerlogo150.jpgBlogging is a fast medium, that's one of its advantages over traditional media. There are bloggers who specialize in reporting fast about breaking news on a wide variety of topics. Most of those bloggers use Google's RSS publishing technology FeedBurner as a middleman to deliver their posts to subscribers and capture analytics.

If FeedBurner decides to take its sweet time in delivering the news, that's bad for bloggers. Unfortunately, that's what's happening right now. We've been seeing delays of up to 20 minutes between posting to our site and our posts appearing in our FeedBurner feeds. That's a pretty serious problem and we're not alone in experiencing it.

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]]> Bloggers who contact FeedBurner to complain are being told that the service is changing ping servers, something they are going to announce once all the kinks are worked out. The new ping server URL is http://ping.feedburner.google.com - so if you want to let your readers know about posts hot off the presses, that's where you want your blogging software to send the news instead of the old ping URL. You can ping both servers and the new ping server is just for the feeds that have migrated to the Google Feedproxy servers, but that could well be you.

If you're still pinging the old URL, and you probably are, we're guessing that FeedBurner isn't even noticing. The service checks all indexed blogs for new posts automatically every 30 minutes so that's probably how your posts are getting noticed at all. FeedBurner says both ping servers are still operating but we only noticed the issue after seeing lengthy delays in updating.

The Consequences We Face

We love FeedBurner for all it does for us, but this is pretty irresponsible on their part. We've noticed that our posts are being seen late by Techmeme, subscribers are getting them later and when other bloggers do a blogsearch for a breaking news topic to see who else has covered it - we're not there. It's bad news. Meanwhile the FeedBurner blog hasn't been updated in 4 months.

In response to an inquiry about the issue, Steve Olechowski, Business Product Manager at AdSense (Adsense now being the raison d'être for our beloved publishing tool) told us, "there's nothing secret here, we're just trying to make sure everything works as expected for publishers before we get a deluge of emails about issues we already know about." That seems like a pretty snide response to a common part of customer service - getting emails about issues you already know about.

We're pinging the new server now and we hope that will work. We suggest you update your software as well and we hope that FeedBurner will be more sympathetic to the needs of the bloggers they exist to serve in the future.

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http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/feedburner_may_not_be_hearing.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/feedburner_may_not_be_hearing.php Blogging Fri, 26 Sep 2008 11:02:44 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick
Mloovi: Translate Any RSS Feed Into 24 Languages mloovilogo.jpgMloovi is a new app that runs any RSS feed through Google Translate. This may not be perfect, but there's is a clear need for such a service so we're pretty excited about it.

Created by the makers of language learning service LearnLists, Mloovi is free with ads and offers premium accounts. The company credits TechCrunch UK's Mike Butcher with the inspiration, and Butcher's blog is where we discovered the service.

]]>Sponsor

]]> Limitations

Let's be up front about limitations of the service: it strips images and formatting, the translations don't read super well, there's no analytics ala Feedburner, etc.

All of that said, we can now see with relative ease what's on the front page of Spanish Digg-type site Méname, so we're happy! When we find something that looks interesting, we'll read the translation, then perhaps try to find English language coverage of the same subject or just be happy to have some information even if it's a little Google-funky.

Read RWW in Spanish, Chinese, Etc.


Want to read (or scan) ReadWriteWeb in Spanish?

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Readwriteweb-inglsToEspaol

How about in Chinese?

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Readwriteweb-ChineseTranslation

We ran the Mloovi-created feeds through FeedBurner so that we could get some idea how much interest there is in reading our content in the languages above.

Are these translations of sufficient quality to be of interest to readers? Let us know what you think in the poll above. RSS readers can click here to visit this post and participate in the poll or see results.

Other Translation Tools

We love our international readers and anyone who takes the time to read RWW in a language other than their native one. As such we try to pay particular attention to tools that facilitate text translation. If these tools are of interest to you too, see also our coverage of Lingro - the on the fly Creative Commons translation dictionary - and DotSub, the collaborative video translation service that results in projects like the one below. Three cheers for the global change made possible by new tools on the web!

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http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/mloovi_translate_any_rss_feed.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/mloovi_translate_any_rss_feed.php Interviews Wed, 06 Aug 2008 10:22:26 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick
Feed Compare: Alexa for Feedburner There are a lot of ways to measure blog popularity, and Feedburner reader counts may be one of the worst. Though reader stats via Feedburner can be helpful for publishers if taken with a helping of salt, and though a Feedburner subscriber chiclet can do wonders for turning casual readers into feed subscribers, the numbers are at times nonetheless very dodgy. That said new service Feed Compare is still a fun way to visualize blog growth as told by Feedburner stats.

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]]> Feed Compare is essentially Alexa for Feedburner. Though the service doesn't offer a top 100, or rank each feed, it does create Alexa-style growth charts based on Feedburner subscriber numbers. The service can compare up to four feeds at once and can display between one and twenty four months of data.

The service isn't without faults, though. The biggest is that it operates understandably off of Feedburner feed URIs. For many sites, that's the same as the site name (ours is "ReadWriteWeb"), but for others, it isn't. If you enter "Problogger" into Feed Compare, for example, you won't wind up with the stats for Darren Rowse's popular blog. The correct URI for Problogger's feed is: "ProbloggerHelpingBloggersEarnMoney." The blog at Search Engine Watch is another example of this. Their URI is "sewblog."

Because many people probably don't realize that that the Feedburner URI isn't always the same as the blog name, or don't know how to find the correct URI, the service will at times offer faulty stats to people. Problogger certainly has more than 85 subscribers, but you may not realize it if you're looking at the report for the "Problogger" URI.

It would be great if Feed Compare were able to allow users to enter in URLs, then automatically discover the correct feed URI on that site, if it exists. It would also be nice if the service offered embeddable charts and even blog rankings by industry. Rankings based on Feedburner numbers might not mean much, but they could still be fun.

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http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/feed_compare_alexa_for_feedburner.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/feed_compare_alexa_for_feedburner.php Products Mon, 02 Jun 2008 13:32:36 -0800 Josh Catone