Tuesday, December 13, 2005
So the good folks over at our partners FeedBurner have a cool new feature called FeedFlare - in a nutshell it enriches your posts with links from the "social network" areas of the blogging world about that post, and then goes on to encourage others to integrate and link to your post. A positive feedback loop, in a sense, which will be extended soon by FeedBurner to web sites (I assume that this will be similar to the BuzzBoost script). Very nice - I think Stowe Boyd at Corante is exactly right as to the significance of its long-term impact.
And, since the "FeedBlitz News" blog is FeedBurner powered, I've enabled FeedFlare for it - it will appear at the end of this (and every) post viewed via an RSS aggregator - and in FeedBlitz emails, of course! So if you're a FeedBurner customer, check FeedFlare out for your subscribers.
Now I'm itching for the API to come out (Eric, need a beta?). There are some FeedBlitz metrics that would fit in perfectly with this approach...
And, since the "FeedBlitz News" blog is FeedBurner powered, I've enabled FeedFlare for it - it will appear at the end of this (and every) post viewed via an RSS aggregator - and in FeedBlitz emails, of course! So if you're a FeedBurner customer, check FeedFlare out for your subscribers.
Now I'm itching for the API to come out (Eric, need a beta?). There are some FeedBlitz metrics that would fit in perfectly with this approach...
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4 Comments:
Well, Phil, now that you mention it! (grin) Drop me an email with some ideas and we'll see what we can put together.
Eric Lunt
Eric - responsive as ever! You have mail :-)
Just 1 question:
FeedBlitz currently samples a feed once in a day, decides which feed items are new (this includes items that have been edited and have therefore changed), bundles them into a single email and sends that email.
My concern is that FeedBlare's dynamic elements i.e. elements that can change over a period of time will cause FeedBlitz to send that post again and again even though nothing has really changed in the post.
For e.g. that assume that a certain feed has FeedBlare Technorati backlinks feature enabled. A certain post/item in that feed has 5 backlinks at time T1. Next day it has 10 backlinks. Will FeedBlitz resend that item again because its contents have seemingly changed.
I had activated FeedBlare for a brief period of time but have since deactivated it because I am not sure how FeedBlitz will deal with this.
Hi Varun:
Your analysis of how FeedBlitz works is correct. FeedFlare is actually a series of graphic imaes generated at render-time (i.e. when viewed) by FeedBurner - it's generated dynamically each time the feed is viewed, but the underlying RSS is not. AFAIK the only change to your RSS content is when you enable FeedFlare in the first place (because the <img> tag is added to your content), which (in some aggregators) will mark the posts as new. As the graphic reflects more changes, I do not think this will modify the RSS.
From FeedBlitz's perspective, since the date of your post does not change, it won't keep sending the same post as more and more people link to it on technorati or whatever. But if you go back and view an older FeedBlitz mail it will have the real-time FeedFlare results, because the graphic will be reloaded when you view the mail.
Unless I'm wrong, of course, in which case I', sure someone will correct me!
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