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.
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.
If 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.
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.
We 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.
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.
Life without feeds would be one of sifting through thousands of endless stories and visiting website after website for content. Thanks to RSS, our lives have been ever so simplified.
OPML has been the typical approach to combining all RSS feeds into a single file that can be exported and imported into any feed reader. Then along comes RSS Mixer. This online tool lets users combine all favorite feeds into one. The drawback to using this is that you cannot simply upload an OPML file, you have to add multiple feeds. But if you have a few feeds that you wanted to follow no matter where you are, like via a mobile device like an iPhone or a widget embedded in your iGoogle homepage, this is a cool way to go. Users start off by giving a title to their 'Mix', then adding feed URL's into the Mix. When RSS Mixer is complete, users get the option to link to the mix, create an Apple Dashboard widget, create a Web Widget, get an RSS feed for the combined feeds, and launch an iPhone version of the mix.
It's a pretty impressive way to easily mix up RSS feeds, and stay on top of them no matter where you are. Our only wish, give us the chance to upload an OPML file.
Want the top news you're interested in without opening up a browser. Well there is a way to do it in just six steps!
Toshibi over at Instructables, (a place where you can share with others what you make, and teach them how to make it) has figured out how to turn his desktop into a constantly updating RSS bulletin board. Steps include:
Creating an HTML document with all the appropriate rows and columns
META tag refresh tag to have the page refresh every 10 minutes
Create HTML feeds with FEED2JS
Save file on computer
Set the HTML page as a LIVE web desktop (correct me if I'm wrong but this feature might only work in XP)
There you have it, all the fresh content you could ever want. Thankfully, Toshihi also proves the full source files to anyone that wants to hack around with it and easily built their own.
Rssfwd is a web-service based tool which sends RSS feeds to your email, if that's your thing.
Working people are getting highly saturated with mountains of email, and many still prefer it to the wilds of web 2.0 newness. Rssfwd caters to this subset of people, making email an interesting and dynamic information tool by coupling the older technology with the newer RSS idea.
While it wouldn't be fun to get your 600-800 feeds all by email every day, it sure is nice to know the idea is there if you ever need it. What a useful tool for bloggers wanting to jump on big stories that shake down and want the big breaks to hit their inbox. You could have RSSFWD email you a few top feeds to read on your mobile device, without the hassle of installing some additional reader. That is worth it's weight in gold.
Online applications are great, but what happens when you can't get a connection to the internet? Whether it is because you are on an airplane, or in the middle of nowhere camping, and have to get certain emails, calendar items, or files, you are quite possibly out of luck. Its sure a bummer, and one of the reasons why so many people are hesitant about using online applications for their most important information.
Now Imagine being able to take your online applications, offline, and store that data locally in a completely searchable database? Google is making this possible with Gears. Google Gears is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide complete offline functionality. Google hopes that developers will use this new toolset to create offline web applications using JavaScript APIs to store and serve the applications resources locally, as well as store data in searchable databases. All of the syncing runs in the background without burning out the browsers memory usage, or slowing anything down.
The Google Gears Beta is currently available for installation on Windows XP,Vista, as well as on Mac and Linux machines. The plug-in works with Firefox 1.5+ and IE 6+. Google's first stop with Gears is Reader, with JavaScript APIs getting released shortly for data storage for use in applications like Docs and Spreadsheets.
The official Google Gears announcement will be made tomorrow to over 5,000 developers at Google's Developer Day gathering.
How do you keep up to date with information from your favorite news sources when on the go? You can't exactly stop at every wireless signal to power your laptop on and connect; it just isn't all that productive. Maybe that's why Mobispine started up.
Mobispine is a feed browser that helps you stay on top of your feeds directly from your phone. To get started, users register and will get a link via SMS for the download. The browser is a pretty quick install. Unfortunately Mobispine does not have a list of compatible mobile devices, but does say that your device must support Java/MIDP2.0. Mobispine also provides some interesting stats as to the latest, most popular and highest rated visited feeds. Would you believe that PerezHilton.com was the most popular? People just can't get enough gossip, especially on the go!
If Twitter and all its buzz in the web community can be considered its own growing world of sorts, then Leo Laporte - one of the service's foremost users according to Twitterholic - just sent ripples through its oceans by announcing his decision to move to Jaiku, a similar service that seems to have longer legs and quite a few more features. Since this was the first we've heard about Jaiku, we couldn't resist swinging by to sign up for an account to see what this micro-blogging, über-status message service has to offer.
In a nutshell: a lot. For starters, Jaiku acts as more of an 'online presence,' allowing you to do things like import RSS feeds from any of your other web properties (including photo feeds from the likes of Flickr) in addition to its fundamental feature of allowing you to post 140-character, SMS-friendly updates of what you're thinking or doing. Jaiku also has refreshing bits of genius sprinkled everywhere, such as the ability to group update notifications via email instead of sending single notices every time any contact posts something. On the downside, however, Jaiku doesn't seem to have nearly as much of a 3rd party following. It has no API (yet), so we're having a hard time finding Jaiku equivalents for TriQQr and the Iconfactory's spectacular Twitterrific client, let alone all the widgets, plugins and mashups which Twitter has quickly grown a reputation for.
Still, Jaiku offers plent of micro-blogging goodness, so give it a spin if Twitter simply isn't offering enough meat to sink your free time into.
We're becoming big fans of Tumblr here at DLS headquarters, and the 'blogging scrapbook' service just introduced a new feed importing feature that makes it an even more appealing tool. A new option in the settings area allows users to add multiple feeds from their other blogs, with the ability to aggregate your other content as regular posts, photos (say, from a Flickr feed) or mere referential links. Combine this feature with Tumblr's option to publish under a custom domain name, and you have one powerful über-blogging service that could even trump Yahoo!'s Pipes in terms of making it easy to aggregate yourself on the web. This way, you get a live HTTP page, as well as an RSS feed, of everything you're publishing.
Setup is dead-simple, and feed aggregation kicks into gear almost immediately. While there is certainly the potential here for this to be abused (as in Tumblr users aggregating and re-publishing content they don't have the rights to), we aren't too worried about it. All in all, this looks like a great new feature to one of the more unique publishing services to arise out of this whole blogging movement.
Adobe released its first look at the newly re-branded myFeedz.com social news site on Friday. The website learns what users like and keeps up with interests in order to serve content. It all started when InterAKT launched their public beta last August, and sold to Adobe a month later. The service is now located deep-within Adobe's Labs, who have been on a web 2.0 kick lately. myFeedz is aimed at finding what's important for the user out there in the crazy overpopulated field of content feeds from the web.
myFeedz helps users keep track of and sift through the endless amounts of information and trends they are interested in, all the while offering relevant information as to their interests. Users begin by importing RSS feeds from favorite websites using OPML, dropping a list of keywords, browsing articles by tags, reading, writing, and rating articles. Articles can then be saved and archived for later reading, and RSS feeds can be exported for you topic of interest.
The site was extremely slow during my testing. Still being in the "lab" format, little issues can be expected. I just hope they get things sorted out fast; This seems like a great little tool!
For a long time now, Google Reader has sat in the camp with other online RSS clients who unfortunately don't (or more correctly: couldn't) report the number of readers subscribed to a feed. This of course can frustrate publishers, as they only see one collective hit from Google Reader instead of an actual number of their readers using that client.
As of this morning, however, the Official Google Reader Blog has changed all of that. In fact, the gReader team has not only enabled their crawler to report an actual number of feed subscribers, that number also includes users who are simply subscribed to a feed via Google Homepage.
Not content to stop at mere numbers, the Google Reader team have also created a Tips for Publishers page that offers ideas for best practices, feed implementation, feed "auto-discovery" and even a few catches to look out for.
It might not have been the much-requested search update that gReader users are salivating for, but these new features should certainly put a smile on most publishers' faces.
