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Filed under: Productivity, Web services, Google

FeedBurner stats now showing up in Google Analytics

You'd think that Google's purchase of FeedBurner a few years back would have meant that FeedBurner stats would be easy to track in Google Analytics. No such luck so far, but Analytics can now track at least some FeedBurner info, although the process isn't very obvious.

If you want to see how many people click through from your FeedBurner feed to your site (no subscriber numbers yet - sorry!) here's how:

In FeedBurner, go to the Analyze tab of your settings. Make sure the "Track clicks as a traffic source in Google Analytics" box is checked. Then, in Analytics, go to "All Traffic Sources" or "Campaigns." Use the search box to search for "feed" or "feedburner," and you'll see your Feed Clicks. Google suggests you select "Ad Content" from the segment drop down in the traffic source data table, so you can see which feed readers your various visitors are using.

According to ReadWriteWeb, more detailed and easier-to-find stats are on their way from Google, so FeedBurners users have plenty of new info to look forward to.

Filed under: Productivity, Web services, Google, Social Software, web 2.0

Google Reader now sorts your feeds "by magic"

Google has made a couple of big improvements to Google Reader, aimed at helping you easily sift through all those RSS feeds to get to the stories you'll find most relevant. One set of new features focuses on finding relevant content that you weren't already aware of, and another feature sorts the stuff you're already subscribed to.

In the sidebar, you'll notice a new "recommended sources" list. These are sites Google Reader thinks you'll like, based on your browsing habits -- if you've opted-in to let Google track those -- and your reading habits in Reader itself. You'll also see a Popular Items section from around the web, showing you some well-read and potentially relevant posts from sites you're not subscribed to.

In addition to these ways of finding new feeds to read, Google Reader can now sort your existing items "by magic," bringing the most relevant articles to the top of your list. To make this happen, go to the settings dropdown for one of your feeds or folders and choose "sort by magic." The magic is actually an algorithm that takes into account what you read and share in Reader, and it seems to work pretty well. I'm not a frequent Google Reader user, and even my relatively untrained recommendations were interesting. If you share and like items on a regular basis, yours will likely be even better.

[via Mashable]

Filed under: Productivity

Brief RSS add-on makes Firefox's Live Bookmarks usable

Live Bookmarks in Firefox are a great idea in theory, but in practice they're a clumsy solution for in-browser feed reading. Brief is an add-on that breathes some life into Live Bookmarks with a nice-looking, usable front end. Setting up Brief is a quick and painless process: just install the add-on and point it to a folder full of RSS feeds. A toolbar button and a status bar button (with your unread items count) will automatically appear, and clicking either one pops open the reader.

Brief's not a bad little reader, either. The layout is attractive, and having a reader inside Firefox means you can quickly click through to the full versions of articles. If you're a CSS whiz, you can even customize the Brief's appearance. I recommend turning on the option to open Brief in a new tab. Otherwise, it can quickly become annoying when it loads in your active tab and takes you away from a page you still wanted to look at.

[via InstantFundas]

Filed under: Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Hi, I'm keeps all your social profiles in one place

With all the social networking sites out there, it can be tedious to share all of your usernames with a new acquaintance. Hi, I'm is a "nametag on the Internet" that you can show people so that they can read - or click through to - your postings on all of your different social sites. Right now, it supports around a dozen networks, including Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr and Last.fm.

The main thing I was worried about with Hi, I'm was whether it needed login credentials for any of my networks, because most of them have public feeds to pull from. Fortunately, it doesn't use your login info at all, although you can sign in with Facebook Connect or MySpace. In addition to your feeds, you can add a quick bio, a photo, and highlighted links to your best stuff. All in all, Hi, I'm is a pretty decent execution of the online identity hub concept. On the other hand, it's nothing you can't do (with a bit more work) with an about page on your bog.

Filed under: News, Web services, Google

Google News RSS buttons go missing, but feeds are still there

If you use Google News frequently, you may have recently noticed something missing from your search results. The buttons to create RSS feeds from search results have been removed from the page.

The missing buttons don't prevent you from creating RSS feeds anyway, though. There are a couple of ways to do it. If your browser autodetects RSS, you can just click the RSS icon in the address bar to get a feed going. You can also get a feed by creating a new Google Alert and selecting "feed" from the dropdown menu.


[via ReadWriteWeb]

Filed under: Internet, Productivity, Web

Fever offers a hot new approach to reading feeds


Fever is a new feed reader that calculates the "temperature" of your feeds by asking you to group them into essential and occasional categories, and looking at how they relate to one another to create a "hot" category. It's like your own personalized, automated Digg. It's the brainchild of Shaun Inman, one of the most respected designers around, and the UI looks great and seems intuitive.

Here's the catch, though: Fever's not a desktop app. It's a PHP/MySQL app that you host on your own server. This offers several advantages: you can access it from anywhere, you can filter ads by blacklisting advertising domains, it updates itself automatically, and you can use cron to make your feeds automatically refresh whenever you choose. Fever is powerful, but I'm sure some people are going to balk at installing it, despite the very nice video walkthrough on the site.

If you don't mind running Fever on your server, but you're the kind of person who really needs an icon in the dock, you can run Fever on the desktop using Fluid, which turns web apps into standalone browsers. Fever also has a very, very nicely-done iPhone-optimized design, so if you're checking your feeds from an iPhone, you're in for a treat (without having to download an iPhone app, even).

Filed under: Web services, web 2.0, sxsw

SXSW 2009: Talking Alltop with Guy Kawasaki



At last year's South by Southwest Christina caught up with technology super-hero Guy Kawasaki to talk about his venture Alltop (which we've previously covered here at Download Squad). This year, we were fortunate enough to chat with Guy about the new MyAllTop area that lets you build a custom collection of your favorite feeds that are listed on the AllTop site on your own personalized page.

The Alltop site also provides a few selected users' profiles to show you the customization at work and since I started using the MyAlltop service a couple of days ago, I've grown to love the passive feed-reading that it offers. Instead of becoming overloaded with RSS items in NetNewsWire, setting your MyAlltop page as your homepage lets you easily dive in and out of news without the pressure of an ever-growing unread item count.

Be sure to check out the video after the break!

Filed under: Social Software, web 2.0

Feedscrub is like a spam filter for your RSS feeds

Just because you subscribe to an RSS feed doesn't mean you want to read every single thing in that feed. What if you read Download Squad just for Brad Linder's posts, or you're only interested in posts about Google? FeedScrub might be what you're looking for. It lets you vote each of your RSS articles up or down, training it to only display the stuff you care about. You then subscribe to the scrubbed feed in your reader, and you're good to go.

Where FeedScrub gets things right is at the bottom of each item in the scrubbed feed, where they've put in buttons so you can train FeedScrub directly from your reader. Where it gets things wrong -- but only a little bit -- is by giving you one set of preferences for all of your subscriptions, instead of letting you export them as separate scrubbed feeds. I'd like to break my unread count down by individual feed, not aggregate it into one scrubbed one.

Filed under: Social Software, web 2.0

SuggestRSS knows which blogs you should be reading

There's so much good content on the web that even RSS power-users can feel like they're missing something. If you're looking for something fresh to read, you might want to give SuggestRSS a try. It analyzes your feeds and makes recommendations based on data from the hundreds of other people in its database, along with an estimate of the chance that you'll like each suggestion.

SuggestRSS uses a tool that you may or may not be familiar with, the OPML file. Serious RSS fiends know that OPML is a list of RSS feeds you subscribe to. You can export an OPML file from most RSS readers, and that's what SuggestRSS looks at to make recommendations. That way it's not tied to any particular reader. As for the results, they're reasonably useful. In my test, I got a good mix of blogs I already knew about and some I'd never heard of.

Filed under: Internet, Blogging, Web services, web 2.0

Feed Analysis: Online tool for measuring Feedburner stats

Feed Analysis
If you maintain a blog, there's a pretty good chance you're addicted to statistics. Whether you typically get 5 page views a day or 5 million, there's something irresistible about clicking the refresh button on any site that will tell you how many hits you've received, how many RSS subscribers you have, and how they're interacting with your site. Feed Analysis is a nifty site that lets you take a look at your long-term RSS numbers. Just enter the URL for your RSS feed (or any site that uses Feedburner, it doesn't have to be your site), and Feed Analysis will spit out a couple of attractive, and useful charts.

You can get a graph showing your subscriber numbers over time. You can choose views ranging from 6 months to 50 months. If Feedburner is set up to track hits on your page, you can also compare your subscribe counts with your hits. And you can even break down your average subscriber numbers by the days of the week, although we're not sure how useful that information is.

Perhaps the most intriguing bit is a note at the top of the first chart that gives you an estimate price for a banner ad on your page. While you may or may not be able to demand the listed price on your blog, it's kind of fun to enter feeds for popular blogs and see how much money they could conceivably be making off a single ad unit.

[via gHacks]

Filed under: Internet, Web services

FeedJournal: Kill a tree and print your RSS feeds like a newspaper

FeedJournal
Ever wish you could print out your RSS feeds and read them like a newspaper? FeedJournal is a new service that lets you convert RSS feeds into printable PDF files. The layout is very newspaper-like. You can choose the number of columns, and whether or not your paper will include images. Web publishers can also add a widget to their web sites that will let visitors view their content as a newspaper-style PDF.

There's something compelling about the newspaper format. For one thing, it can be much faster to read text in short columns because your eyes don't have to move across the width of your computer screen. On the other hand, why the heck would you want to print out a "newspaper" with a list of feeds that are updated far more frequently than your daily paper? Do you know how much paper and ink that could potentially waste?

FeedJournal Developer Jonas Martinsson says that FeedJournal works best for sites with longer articles that you might not want to read while sitting in front of your computer. So he acknowledges that you might not want to print every article from every blog or news site you follow. But most sites that publish long articles don't include the full story in their RSS feeds, and FeedJournal will only grab the portion of the text included in the feed.

Overall, FeedJournal presents a neat trick, but we're not sure we can see ourselves using it very often.

Filed under: Internet, web 2.0

Tiinker - Intelligent news aggregator

TiinkerIf you are looking for news items based on your interests, you might enjoy Tiinker. Tiinker allows you to rate news items from feeds and automatically finds more items based on what you liked and didn't like.

It works like this: as you go through news items and vote on them, Tiinker goes about learning what kind of news you would like more of. Give a post on technology a thumbs up and Tiinker will remember that you have a thing for tech.

At first glance it might look a bit like Digg - but you will quickly realize that it isn't, as the only social aspect to the site is a collection of the most popular posts. The only variable that affects what stories are dished up is what you have given a thumbs up or down to in the past. Also, you are unable to introduce new feeds into the system, and can't get recommendations by cross-referencing what you've liked with users who have had similar tastes.

Nitpicking aside, the idea behind Tiinker is nice. If you like a customized news portal that adapts to your tastes the more you use it, this is it. But, if Tiinker can figure out a way to include some more social features such as ranking RSS feeds by popularity and allowing users to add new feed items, this could grow into something of a personalized meme that tracks the best stories for the things you are interested in. Until then, Tiinker isn't bad as long as you don't mind some of the limitations.

[via Lifehacker]

Filed under: Text, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm, Productivity, Web services, Freeware, BlackBerry, iPhone, web 2.0

RSS SMS for your cell phone: annoying or useful?

RSS SMS for your cell phone: annoying or useful?
At first, it sounds like a texting nightmare from hell, but RSS via SMS has a place in our world through Web-Alerts, a small web experiment that may get lost in the vast internet desert that is web 2.0 failures. The service sends you a text message for every update to a chosen site's RSS feed.

The service is simple and easy to use. When you first visit the site, it'll ask your to enter a web address. If it finds an RSS feed for your chosen site, it'll ask you to enter your cell phone number. Should any updates happen to your chosen feed, a preview of the update will be forwarded to your phone. Removing a subscription is easy enough. "Just open the link in your text message and choose 'My Alerts' to remove any alert you are subscribed to." Furthermore, you can enter a keyword with your phone number so that you'll only be forwarded updates via SMS when they contain the keyword.

This could be extremely useful for someone closely watching a specific topic such as a stock broker. It could also become extremely annoying if you find yourself answering your phone every ten minutes to stop the latest SMS from incessantly vibrating in your pocket. Our advice: use wisely.

[via The Boy Genius]

Filed under: Business, Internet, Blogging, Productivity, Web services

Build feeds easily with Feedmarklet

Build feeds easily with FeedmarkletWe heavily rely on RSS for easily managing our online resources. Thats why its great to learn about sources that can help us create feeds without any effort to keep things in order and manageable. Especially when websites might not have RSS feeds.

Feedmarklet is a way to set up your own RSS feed, and add content to it via a bookmarklet. It's as easy as creating the bookmarklet in your browser, pressing it whenever you come across good content, whether it has an RSS feed or not. The page you are visiting will get added to your feed with the Feedmarklet application extracting the page title and URL dropping it into a form. All you need to do then is write up a description (which can be done by selecting some page text before hitting your "add to feed button") and be on your RSS way.

[via webworkerdaily]

Filed under: Business, Design, Developer, Internet, Blogging, Web services

Bloglines finally gets a redesign

bloglines redesign

Bloglines has just packed a bunch of new features into its online news feed searching, subscribing to and reading service, and it all begins with a start page.

Bloglines headlines its new feature developments with a personalized start page. This is the page that brings everything together in a quick and easy view with an AJAX interface. There is nothing like starting feed reading off with a view like this to help you distinguish and gravitate towards your top interests first, before they get lost in a sea of unread material. Users can also now drag and drop feeds to add them into a three panel interface. To make things even easier, Bloglines has integrated mouse over previews to get a quick snippet of the content for a more in depth look at the article. Two other views are also available to complement the three panel view, a full view, and quick view mode. The quick view lists out titles for an easy news scan, with the full view listing out full article content.

This new redevelopment comes more than two years after the Bloglines acquisition by IAC interactive, the company that owns the popular ASK search engine. It can be accessed at http://beta.bloglines.com.

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