Welcome to Googleholic, your bi-weekly fix of everything Google! In this edition:
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Street View expands
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Docs gets PDF storage
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Feedburner's new address
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Google Reader, Contra-style
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Grand Theft Google
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GBroswer rumors
Posts with tag feedburner
Googleholic for June 10, 2008
Advertising abhors a vacuum: AdSense headed for Feedburner feeds
It's been almost a year since Google acquired RSS service Feedburner or $100 million. But in that year, we've seen very little integration of Google services into Feedburner, or vice versa. Sure, it's now easier to redirect your Blogspot feed to Feedburner, but that's about it.Now, according to the official Feedburner blog, the company is getting ready to roll out the thing we'd all kind of been expecting: Google AdSense integration. What that means is you're probably going to start seeing much more advertising in your RSS reader.
While there are already a few ways to place ads in an RSS feed, a huge number of blogs and web sites use Feedburner to polish and publish their feeds. Being able to place ads in their feeds with just a few clicks of a button almost certainly means that many of those content publishers will be flipping the switch as soon as they can. Up until now, most web publishers viewed RSS feeds as a loss leader. You give away some of your content, ad-free, in the hopes of gaining loyal readers who will tell their friends about the site. But if you can also get a few of them to click on ads even if they rarely visit your actual web page, why wouldn't you do it?
What do you think? Are you a web publisher looking forward to Google AdSense/Feedburner integration? Or are you a loyal blog reader preparing to unsubscribe to any feeds that start displaying ads?
Feed Analysis: Online tool for measuring Feedburner stats
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]
FeedBurner + Google = AdSense integration (but not the way you'd think)
It's a bit puzzling that the Google-owned RSS publishing company is launching a service that has nothing to do with RSS feeds. There are plenty of other ways to place AdSense ads in between posts on your blog.
FeedBurner makes the process pretty easy as long as you have "FeedFlare" on your website. All you have to do is login to your FeedBurner account, click the monetize tab, login to AdSense, and choose the type of ads you want to use. You can choose from 468 x 60 pixels or 300 x 250 pixels.
Google integrates FeedBurner with Blogspot
But wait, you say, couldn't we always use FeedBurner to spruce up boring Blogger/Blogspot feeds? Right you are. But you had to jump through so many hurdles to change the auto-discovery preferences for your blog that you never really knew if subscribers were signing up through FeedBurner or Google's automatically generated feed.
Now there's a nice new setting conveniently located under Settings/Site Feed that lets you redirect your site feed. That's it. Type in your FeedBurner address and you're all set. In fact, there's nothing stopping you from entering any feed redirecting service.
Of course, true integration would mean not having to redirect anything at all. Perhaps sometime down the line we'll see Google make FeedBurner the default feed service for Blogspot.
Google opens up FeedBurner MyBrand to all users
Hot on the heals of Google snapping up Feedburner, features that were once Google's second free slot in FeedBurner went to the MyBrand premium service. This once $3-$14/month service that runs all feeds through publishers own domains is now open to all users. The MyBrand service allows for content publishers to obtain a transparent branded experience when their content is accessed online. All of FeedBurners services can still be utilized, but everything will run through the publishers domain (feeds.domainnamehere.com). Publishers will be able to do this by changing the CNAME in their DNS records.
The FeedBurner MyBrand service is free and accessible through FeedBurner accounts. Activation instructions can also be found upon login as well.
[via GoogleSystem]
Google and FeedBurner make it legal
Looks like the rumors were true, Google has purchased RSS management company Feedburner. In a blog post, Google VP Susan Wojcicki wrote that the acquisition fits into the company's efforts to find new tools for content creators and AdWords advertisers. FeedBurner syndicates feeds for over 400,000 publishers, and provides tools for analyzing monetizing their feeds.
It'll be interesting to see how Google combines its existing services with FeedBurner, for example making it easier to add AdSense to an RSS feed, or merging Google Analytics with FeedBurner's analysis tools.
There's no official word on the terms of the deal, but early reports had Google paying $100 million for FeedBurner.
[via Read/Write Web]
Google to pay $100 million for Feedburner
As Google continues its march toward world domination, the search behemoth (giant just doesn't do it anymore, does it?) is in the process of buying up Feedburner.The deal, which will reportedly be official within a few weeks, is worth about $100 million in cash.
Feedburner is probably the Google of the RSS management world, making it easy to publish an enhanced RSS feed from just about any website. As of this afternoon, Feedburner is responsible for 721,074 feeds from over 422,717 publishers.
The company's founders will stay with the company for at least a few years as part of the deal.
FeedBurner StandardStats regular web statistics introduced
FeedBurner has solidified itself as the statistics package of choice if you want to know how many RSS subscribers you have, and learn details about how your feeds are used. I don't think there's any question that they've got a solid product on their hands; there are very few web publishers I know that use syndication in any capacity that are not heavy FeedBurner users. In a move that surprised me at first, but seems to make absolute sense once considered, FeedBurner has introduced a more traditional web traffic statistics package, dubbed StandardStats. StandardStats is a free service that is fully integrated into the FeedBurner interface, giving users a one-stop shop for insight into the content that is helping their site, and where their traffic is coming from.
Once you've included FeedBurner's FeedFlare code (a small chunk of code that allows you to add FeedBurner functionality to your site), it's a simple matter of turning on the "Track metrics for my site" checkbox under the StandardStats menu option, and you're all set. You get a second menu under Feed Stats called Site Stats, with the following headings: Dashboard, Visitors, Pages, Incoming (links) and Outgoing (links).
So far I've only had it running on my personal site for a few hours, but already it's clear which posts are most popular, and how people are reaching my site. Very cool stuff, and very easy to read. My only reservation is that as with any time you include code from another site on your site, it can potentially negatively impact the speed your site renders at. FeedBurner seem to have a handle on keeping their web properties responsive, so this definitely isn't a problem at the moment, but is worth considering.
Google Analytics and Feedburner Reports plugin for WordPress
If you're a blogger using WordPress, and you're looking for a good way to view both your web visitor statistics as well as your syndicated reader statistics, consider using Google Analytics and FeedBurner. Google Analytics, which was once known as Urchin, is a free and full-featured web statistic reporting package. FeedBurner is a best-of-breed syndicated feed monitoring service. But once you've got both of those systems in place, you'll want an easy way to view your statistics, preferably right from your WordPress administration interface. And guess what? That's what this post is about. The accurately named Google Analytics and Feedburner Reports plugin for WordPress is exactly what you're looking for. Here's a list of features:
- Provides you with a birds-eye view of what's going on with your site
- Retrieves data from Google Analytics and Feedburner
- Reports are represented visually with graphs
- Choose the reports you want to view
- Ability to automatically install the Google Analytics tracking code for you, along with optional outbound link tracking.
The Future of Web Applications Conference
Carson Workshops is running a two day conference on the development of technology you will be using tomorrow in San Francisco at the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre, on September 13-14. This isn't a no name conference either! There will be some big-hitters speaking at the event, including:- Kevin Rose from digg
- Mike Arrington from TechCrunch
- Mike Davidson from Newsvine
- Jeff Veen from Google
- Tantek Celik from Technorati
- Cal Henderson from Flickr
- Matt Mullenweg from Wordpress
- Evan Williams from Odeo
- Tom Coates from Yahoo!
- Ted Rheingold from Dogster
- Carl Sjogreen from Google Calendar
- Steve Olechowski from Feedburner
- Ryan Carson from DropSend and Amigo
More podcasts than radio stations in the world
FeedBurner's Burning Questions blog has a Podcast Market Update that includes this little
tidbit: there are now more podcast feeds on the web than radio stations in the world. No kidding. Podcasts have seen
seeing 15% growth from month to month and at the end of march FeedBurner was tracking nearly 45,000 of them. It also
turns out that the old chestnut about there being more podcasts than listeners isn't entirely true: more than 1.6
million people subscribe to podcasts through FeedBurner. Head over to Burning Questions for lots more info
and some pretty charts.FeedBurner for your inbox
There's a whole pile of RSS-to-Email services out there, but if anyone can break into the market it's FeedBurner,
and to that end they've launched FeedBurner
Email. It's a new service for publishers that lets readers get updates in their e-mail inbox rather than a feed
reader. FeedBurner founder Dick Costolo says it's "largely 'brandless,'" meaning the e-mails that arrive
don't look like they were delivered from your web site, not FeedBurner. Furthermore, publishers have access to
subscribers' e-mail addresses (so they can leave FeedBurner Email and move to another service without a fuss) and, most
impressively, the service is free.
