Bits and pieces of Google's acquisition of FeedBurner continue to seep out. Friday marked the quiet "public" launch of AdSense for Feeds, a service that was soft-launched to a small group of AdSense users back in May.
Once integrated into publishers' RSS feeds, it'll serve up contextually-related advertising based around the content, helping publishers make money off the growing number of users accessing their site through RSS readers instead of the site where page and ad views have been factors in revenue.
For users who did not have access to the AdSense for Feeds menu in Google's AdSense, it's a pretty straightforward setup. Publishers can set ad frequency, placement, and have it only add them on content that's over a certain size. It also employs the same "channels" tool that lets you later track ad campaigns on certain sections of your site.
Google Blogoscoped's Ionut Alex Chitu notes this release comes just a few weeks after the closure of FeedBurner's in-house ad publishing network, meaning all new publishers will need to through AdSense to be included in in-feed advertisements.
AdSense users can now set up advertising for RSS feeds, right down to what length of post gets advertising.
(Credit: CBS Interactive)
On Monday Joop Dorresteijn, contributing editor at The Next Web, unveiled a vulnerability in Google-owned feed tracking service Feedburner that lets anyone with some basic copy and paste skills and a Netvibes account pump up their blog subscriber numbers into the hundreds of thousands.
The "hack" is a two step affair, involving first tweaking an OPML file that lists your subscriptions, then subscribing to said feed in a simple feed-aggregation tool like Netvibes or My Yahoo. The data will then be fed through Feedburner's counters overnight, with the freshly increased numbers showing up the next morning.
Google is likely to fix the loophole by changing the way subscriptions are counted, either by tracking it on a per-service basis or using a more extensive security system that links up each subscription to a central account system. In the meantime the easiest way to spot blogs that have done this will likely be to keep an eye on abnormally large influxes of subscriptions within a 24-hour period.
You can see a video of how to do this with your own blog below, just keep in mind Google is likely to patch this shortly, although it has yet to acknowledge the vulnerability in the company's Feedburner product blog.
Feedburner hacked! from Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on Vimeo.
Blogger users have gotten a few new treats in the past day or so:
Feed integration Blogger users can now redirect their Blogger feeds through FeedBurner by simply copying and pasting it in the Settings menu. Once FeedBurner is activated, Blogger users will be able to track how their content is being consumed, using tracking and metrics services. It's the first implementation of FeedBurner's technology in a Google product since the company was acquired in early June.
Polls Polls were a feature made available first in Blogger in Draft, before "graduating" to the regular version of Blogger yesterday. Blog owners can design their polls with multiple votes per user and create as many possible answers as they'd like. The polls return results instantly, and can be set to end at a specific time.
Even cooler is a new feature aimed at Blogger in Draft guinea pigs testers that lets them add an AJAX-enabled blog search. This new search goes through the trouble of searching through your blog posts, the Web, pages you've linked, and those on your blog's sidebar. It will also return results without leaving the page. If you tend to link a lot, this could be very helpful for both you and your users. To give it a spin, the search is enabled at the Blogger in Draft blog.
FeedBurner has announced that both its Stats PRO and MyBrand services will be free from now on. This news is coming a little over a month after Google acquired FeedBurner at the end of May. I will admit that I was a little skeptical when Google bought FeedBurner as to how it would affect the actual service, but this is certainly a step in the right direction.
FeedBurner's Stats PRO is just an enhancement to the regular stats that FeedBurner already provides. Most notably, it contains a stat called "reach" and also item views. As opposed to the number of subscribers that is displayed by FeedBurner, reach is a measure of how many people are "actively engaging with your content." If you want to enable Stats PRO on your account, you have to go and turn it on in your feed's control panel, though it is free for everyone.
MyBrand is a service that really appeals to larger sites that still want the benefits of using FeedBurner, such as stat tracking, but want everything to be hosted on their own domain. MyBrand lets you host your feed and access all of your stats from your domain to make the whole experience very transparent.
So, if you are interested in either of these services, just log in to your FeedBurner account and make the upgrade for free. Hopefully these are just the first of many improvements to come for FeedBurner now that it is backed by Google.
You and I may be RSS junkies, but plenty of Internet users are not. The masses still dig reading e-mail. And sending it: many small business owners are more comfortable blasting their customers with e-mail than they are updating a blog.
Feedblitz, an established blog-to-e-mail service provider, is rolling out new capabilities that serve both readers and authors who aren't comfortable with blogs and RSS feeds. Like Feedburner, Feedblitz can convert blogs to e-mail feeds. In fact, Feedburner offers Feedblitz-powered e-mails to its users. But Feedblitz on its own offers a lot more customization options, including a solution that bypasses blogs and RSS entirely.
Here's a simple sign-up box, powered by Feedblitz:
As input, Feedblitz can slurp in an RSS feed, or publishers can create posts directly from the Feedblitz site, or, reportedly, by sending e-mails (I couldn't get the e-mail posting to work). Subscribers can then get these publications as regular e-mails, or as RSS feeds (as a bonus, the RSS feeds include links that will read your posts out loud), or as Skype, AIM, or Twitter messages.
Feedblitz feed setup. Ouch.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Publishers have a lot of control over how people subscribe and what they get in their feeds. They can create feeds only made up of items that are tagged a certain way, and the feeds can be personalized with the subscribers' names or any other information the publisher collects when signing people up.
The system also gives publishers good branding opportunities (correcting an earlier TechCrunch criticism): your e-mails can appear to come from your own domain, and you can strip out Feedblitz logos on paid accounts.
A few things about Feedblitz need work, however. The publishing interface is painful. There are confusing form fields to fill out and the site's navigation is unclear -- very un-Web 2.0. Also, delivering feeds to Twitter and Skype is a parlor trick (who really uses Skype as a feed reader?). A better bet would be to allow subscribers to have their feeds inserted automatically into their social network pages on Facebook and MySpace. The company may offer these options soon.
Anyone who wants to make their information available to the widest variety of users should consider Feedblitz. It's a useful tool for marketers, and a decent way to convert a blog to an e-mail feed.
See also: Constant Contact.
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