I can’t even pinpoint within my data as to when this foolish or unfortunate incident occured because well… just look at the data.

That is nigh on 5 years of Google Blogsearch referral data, though because of the long time range it is listed as sampled data. There may be some traffic sources I have missed – variations of url depending on how Google were displaying blogsearch pages, but that is referrals from http://blogsearch.google.com

• In the past when I have checked at various times (though admittedly it has been a while) I had ranked well in blogsearch.
• There have always been so few referrals that I have more or less ignored Blogsearch
• The only blogsearch I have used are for links to me – in the WordPress interface, and occasionally to grab more results than WordPress displays – it has always been unreliable
• Blogsearch picks up links from all kinds of things
  • blogroll links
  • comments
  • if you send a pingback and a blog displays them, it will come up in blogsearch too

Because of all of these factors I had always assumed that the idea of using noindex on a feed of any kind was to prevent that feed appearing in Google’s primary organic results.

A pretty Feedburner feed isn’t a terrible landing page, but it is possble to do better. I have even written about using my feedburner URL when leaving blog comments in the past, as in some ways it immediately signals you want people to subscribe more so than linking to a blog.

Other RSS search engines were indexing my feed content – Technorati, Blogcatalog, Icerocket – my feeds were being read by my readers, picked up by various Twitter robots etc.

And of course my content remained indexed in Google’s primary organic index.

But then a few days ago I was browsing a little and looking for additional sources for a story followon, and noticed I wasn’t listed for previous coverage. I hadn’t been specific in the title that I was related… but there wasn’t a lot of competition.

Then I discovered this:-

My first thought for 5 minutes was somehow for some crazy reason I had become penalized in Google Blogsearch – then I rationalized it in thinking it must be something to do with noindex settings in Feedburner.

You see I had never equated noindex with a blog search engine – every other blog search engine which sent me traffic was still picking up my content and sending me traffic.

Google Indexing RSS Feeds

There is still a very real need for a way to tell Google…

“Hey Google, this is my RSS feed – you can index it for Google Blog Search, but I don’t want it to appear in the organic search results.”

3 years ago Google were saying they were working to remove RSS feeds from organic search.
3 years later feeds from Feedburner are still appearing in organic search results.

http://feeds.feedburner.com all the results seem to have been removed
http://feeds2.feedburner.com there still seems to be plenty of feeds within the search results

Information About & Help With Feedburner Since Google Acquisition

On a scale of 1 to 10 Google Feedburner Support gets a 2 – it is a free service, Google monetize it providing Adsense for feeds, but don’t expect anyone to answer support queries in the Google groups from Feedburner.
Documentation is sparse – hardly updated in the over 3 years since Google bought Feedburner… but then there haven’t been too many visible changes other than adding Adsense. I am sure there have been changes to help with scaling, especially how it eventually was made easier to integrate with Blogspot, but very little for anyone else.

Feedburner Noindex Controls

So this I believe is the culprit

This is the code that gets added to the RSS feed.

<xhtml:meta xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" name="robots" content="noindex" /><meta xmlns="http://pipes.yahoo.com" name="pipes" content="noprocess" />

That data is still not transferred to feed items that are shared within Google Reader or feeds such as tags created there – which can get fed to other places and indexed.

The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing

I have explained my whoopsie, but somewhere in the Googleplex they are a little confused over what they are doing as well.

Blogsearch isn’t the only search for my Blog posts

For instance there is Google Buzz

Now remember – Google is treating the noindex on my RSS feed as being an instruction to not include my content in Google BlogSearch…. so you would expect that instruction to be universal for the RSS content.

Those were taken from the PUBLIC timeline of Buzz. That is content that Google isn’t indexing on Blogsearch due to a noindex in the XML.

I also have my full content being fed into Facebook and being indexed and made searchable within Facebook, but at least that is my choice.

The only way to prevent content being shared and indexed is currently to block Google Reader from accessing feeds. I have been trying for over 4 years to get Google to introduce more publisher controls for sharing… as it would be easy to share private content from Google Reader by mistake… with Pubsubhubbub it can be broadcast by mistake to your 1000s of Buzz subscribers instantly.
This is possibly why Google have never introduced support for http authentication.

With their current stance for sharing freedoms, it doesn’t make sense for them to treat the current xml declarations as an instruction not to index the content in Blogsearch, as the content is in Buzz anyway. It should be treated as just a noindex for the page.
Alternatively they should add support for x-header noindex, then noindex in the XML would be for search engines, and it should travel with each content item, even to Buzz, possibly with no way to share the content.

I suppose it makes things simpler for people who weren’t already doing something similar for feeds, and at least they are segregating clicks between email and RSS, something their competitors for RSS > Email such as Aweber, Feedblitz, Mailchimp etc have been able to do for a long time.

What they can’t do is track RSS signups as a goal, and until they can do that from a marketing perspective RSS is fairly useless.

Google Reader is also still misbehaving – even if you use a 307 temporary redirect to your Feedburner URL, Feedburner evaluates the URL before offering the feed for subscription. You end up with split URLs in Google Reader depending on the signup method.

Http://andybeard.eu/feed

Http://andybeard.eu/feed/

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Exploring-Niche-Websites

I have read of ways using iframes to spoof the signup process a little, but from a marketing perspective it isn’t really acceptable and no substitute for a real thank you page process that can also be defined as a goal.

Google still is driving the assumption that RSS should be free to share, and not measured, but they are losing that battle to Twitter – they have no support for authenticated RSS feeds, and you can’t prevent people sharing RSS content that might be personal, either sensitive data or paid subscription.

This severely limits the utility of RSS for paid subscription content, RSS use to monitor collaboration services, etc.

It is also a financial risk – ever licensed an image from IstockPhoto? I am not a lawyer but…

What happens if that image, which is licensed for 500,000 impressions ends up on the Digg home page and is spread virally accross the internet? At $1 per hundred additional viewers, an image that is seen by an additional 500,000 could set you back $5000 – Istockphoto are owned by Getty, hardly known for being generous to accidental image plagiarism.

Feedburner team… what happened to that open directory of Pingshot ping locations? Hell even just a current list of where you update would be better than nothing.

I am not sure exactly what changed within WordPress 2.8.4 to cause this but for a large segment of my readers there might not have been any visible updates on RSS feeds since around 6th September.

I wasn’t experiencing the problem, as email subscriptions to my own feed, and Google Reader subscriptions were not affected, because these pull directly from my feed on Feedburner which was being updated.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Exploring-Niche-Websites

However, some RSS readers and feed aggregators actually behave themselves and subscribe to the feed exactly as it appears in my header.

http://andybeard.eu/feed

Unfortunately, those feed readers haven’t been able to access my feed, caught in some kind of broken redirection loop that I haven’t had time to fully diagnose… but it is fixed now.

I don’t know which of the plugins is really the culprit…

• If I remove a feed redirect from Feedburner Feedsmith, the original raw WordPress feed works fine… so that would make it look like it was the fault of Feedburner Feedsmith.
• However, if I switch of caching with WordPress Supercache Plus, redirects work fine as well. I currently have a slightly old SVN bleeding edge version so something may have been tweaked since. It also affects WordPress Supercache as noted my Marc at WTC a month or so ago.
• This also started happening when I upgraded to WordPress 2.8.4, so that upgrade could be blamed

If I actually looked at my Feedburner stats more often than once a month, I might have noticed before, and have to thank Internet Business Solutions expert John for nudging me about it. (he has some great email marketing info)

The Bandaid Fix

This isn’t a permanent solution, one of the plugins or WordPress 2.8.4 is doing something wrong/different, but this works.

You just need to add /feed to the list of regular expression declarations which determine which pages are not cached, by whichever variation of caching plugin you are using.

This isn’t a major issue. Anything calling /feed for your primary RSS feed should be redirected to Feedburner anyway, and the same could be true of the primary comments feed.
The only heavier load would be for comment feeds for individual posts, and feeds for things like category & tag pages.

The culprit may indeed be the Feedburner Feedsmith plugin, as comments on Marks blog post suggest that alternative Feedburner redirect plugins work without any problems.

My Advice

Ignore all the other ping lists published – they are frequently irrelevant and could potentially highlight you as a spammer.

But read all the article… things are not so crystal clear.

This is my current WordPress Ping List

http://ping.feedburner.com/

http://rpc.blogcatalog.com/

To be honest, I have only just added Blogcatalog to the list though they have had an interface for a couple of years, as it seems they need a little bit of a nudge on occasion.

Feedburner Have A Pingshot Service

Feedburner Pingshot used to provide a list of services to ping. Now you just switch it on

The Problems With Current Ping Lists

• Replication – There is no need to ping a whole load of sites, which all then subsequently re-ping all the same services
• Current – I have seen many ping lists that include services that stopped accepting ping notifications 2 or 3 years ago
• Safety – You are only sending a ping to Feedburner (plus 2 optional services) and allowing Feedburner to handle notifications correctly.
• Reliable – despite the occasional problems, over 4 years of blogging I have never had a major problem with Feedburner that couldn’t be fixed with a nudge (resync). I would hope their back end is smart enough to cache pings for services that they know are offline, retry problems etc.
  These are things a WordPress plugin just can’t effectively replicate.
• Membership – a lot of the sites featured on ping lists are for members only – you need to have your blog listed before you send them pings.

Only add to the list if you find a specialist site that isn’t covered by Pingshot (but read on… it is important)

Various WordPress Ping Plugins

There are various plugins for WordPress that handle pings, preventing a re-ping on a post edit.

I am going to be frank – rubbish (I kept it polite)

If you update a post, you want it to be re-pinged unless it is a very minor edit (there is a minor edit plugin). Minor edit prevents the data/time of the post changing on an edit, a much more significant feature for your feed readers.

If you are using the Tweetmeme plugin, in theory updates are re-pinged – if they don’t pick it up, you might need to use their re-ping interface.
This is important for when the message and title of a story change.

Ping Lists For Niche Sites

I wouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket, use multiple Feedburner accounts, Gmail accounts etc.

If all you are creating is spam sites, you lose the potential positive signal of Feedburner legitimacy, matching Google Analytics, Website Optimizer etc, plus of course the utility.

Feedburner’s 2 Year Google Screwup

I suggested a long time ago that Google buying Feedburner was a major disaster for users.

7+7 Reasons Why Google Buying FeedBurner is a Match Made in Heaven & Hell

The pingshot feature is one item of many that has been sorely neglected through half-implemented progress.

Progress?

The Google Feedburner team supposedly are meant to be implementing an “open directory” of all the services that are supported by Pingshot – that is why they removed the ping list.

What makes PingShot different from other solutions?

You mean other than PingShot girl? Well, PingShot is an open directory. Any third party can register to participate.

And for you publishers, the service is automatic by simply activating it once within the Publicize section – just set and forget it. (You can come back and deactivate it whenever you want.) Also, our super high-powered extra strength feed management technology ensures that only changes in content trigger notification. So, there’s that.

The problem is that the directory has never appeared, so you don’t know where they are pinging.

This isn’t new, Google have been talking about this “directory” for at least 8 blinking &*%$$ months

Every contact link on the Feedburner Help site redirects to this page.

Support questions regarding Pingshot are totally ignored in the Google groups, and when a member of the community does forward a question to the Feedburner team, no answers come back.

Feedburner is/was a great service, but Google is killing it. I PAID for Feedburner with a pro account, and would have gladly paid more if they had continued to innovate.

Google Stealing My Readers

Now Darren might not mind that advert for another of Google’s services, but he is not being paid for it. It adds to his subscriber count, but often email subscribers are more responsive than RSS readers, especially with people abandoning RSS in favor of Twitter.

People don’t abandon email totally.

I don’t have as many readers as Darren, but if someone wanted top and bottom placement in every one of my blog posts (in the feed), it would likely cost them $1000+ a month, not that I would do it, and that is based upon my current irregular posting schedule.

I wouldn’t accept Google reader as an advertiser, because it is a negative on my ability to market in the future

Well… maybe for $5000/month

Sneaking advertising into email subscriptions could even be looked on as an endorsement. A false endorsement – if Google want me to promote Google Reader, they should pay me.

Darren had a few other requests / complaints as well, but this is a deal breaker for me. My email is moving.

If Google don’t fix things, I expect I will be pinging Feedblitz instead soon, and I am still undecided on email. None currently offer all I need, which is why I haven’t switched, and have constantly encouraged innovation.

http://www.feedblitz.com/f/f.fbz?XmlPing

I am sure Phil from Feedblitz will see this, who if anyone does Feedblitz ping?

Friendfeed Now Counted In Feedburner

It can make quite a striking difference with Feedburner if you have a few followers there.

But even this doesn’t really account for the shifting sands in online attention.

The latter half of this post was originally published Mar 21, 2008 @ 20:38

Since then Twitter has for many people emerged as the primary way they read RSS feeds, combined with various forms of lifestreaming.

The first time I see tweets and blog posts often is also on services such as Blogcatalog’s dashboard or even Mybloglog (though that can sometimes lag a little on updates these days)

Current Calculation Problems

• Blogcatalog & Mybloglog numbers are just as relevant as Friendfeed
• Twitter numbers are probably more relevant than any Lifestreaming service
• Facebook subscribers are still not counted
• Aweber & Feedblitz, along with Feedburners own RSS to Email service are included, but they are the only ones I know about. Where is the Getresponse support Simon? Infusionsoft should really offer something as well, though they don’t offer RSS to email – I am not sure about Mailchimp

The onus really is on the developers of these other platforms to report numbers to Feedburner, but I have no idea how that can be managed with Facebook and Twitter.

With both Facebook and Twitter there are 2 significant problems

• The data doesn’t always come from an RSS feed – individual Facebook apps programmers use various methods to pull data, and often Facebook items come from other sources. The source on Twitter could be any one of the many RSS to Twitter services, but equally could be a WordPress plugin.
• Items get shared – shared items in Google reader have often affected Feedburner data in the past, how does this work with retweets?

It is good to see services like Postrank now feature within Feedburner stats, as they provide various ways to filter RSS content on multiple topics, and then include only the best items for you to read.
(Niche marketers will probably find a way to make best use of that)

Note: I do have specific strategic reasons why I don’t currently display any RSS subscription options, or even an email subscription box.
This post used to have lots of comments, but Disqus hasn’t managed to sync them after 2 days.

It is amazing how long it takes for things to catch up, the following was written over 15 months ago, and the numbers are really still totally inaccurate

Originally published Mar 21, 2008 @ 20:38

I have been digging around in my Feedburner stats to see how various social streaming and life streaming applications I use are reporting data to Feedburner.

Friendfeed

Currently reports as:-

Section:- Feedreader & Aggregator
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; FriendFeedBot/0.1; +http://friendfeed.com/about/bot)

5 subscribers

Blogcatalog

Currently reports as:-

Section:- Bot
Blogcatalog bot

1 hit

MyBlogLog

I am not sure which Yahoo service they are reporting as, so I am listing a few possibilities

Currently reports as:-

Section:- Feed Readers and Aggregators
My Yahoo
A web-based newsreader that allows you to select and manage RSS headlines within a My Yahoo! account.
42 subscribers

There is also Yahoo! Slurp and Yahoo Test Bot – both listed as bots

Is Lifestreaming Subscribing?

Here are some reasons Lifestreaming should count as a subscription

• Personal – with most applications views can be attributed to individual users
• Selected – unlike meme trackers, someone has made a specific choice to read your content
• Trackable – if necessary it would be possible to identify only active users
• Traffic – traffic from lifestreaming is quite visible, though it is hard to determine if it comes from a RSS subscription link, or when someone tweets about you, or maybe from being Stumbled or dugg
• Email – Friendfeed sends subscriptions by email too – does that make it 2 subscriptions?
• Active – people are actually using these services more and more, and subscription data would thus be a useful representation

There are some aspects I am not sure should be counted, but are probably more valuable data than from many feedreaders

• Profile views – MyBlogLog, Blogcatalog and Friendfeed all allow visitors to view content before deciding to subscribe to it in some way – whist no long term commitment is made, a lot of this activity can be attributed to individual unique users, thus could be counted as a subscriber in some way.
• Shared Social Media Links – as mentioned before, when links to your site appear having been dugg, stumbled or shared in Google Reader – whilst this can result in traffic, it might not be something that can be counted as it is not necessarily related to the RSS feed, but to the permalink.
• MyBlogLog Topics – this is based upon their tagging system (I have wanted it to link to content for ages – make sure you update and cleanup your tags) – I don’t think it would be appropriate for this data to end up in RSS subscription stats
• BlogCatalog Social Search – also recently introduced and whilst it doesn’t have RSS yet (nudge Daniel) I can see this happening in the future – again this is a search much like you would have on Technorati or Google Blogsearch

RSS Bankruptcy

Depending on how you use these sites, they can add or subtract to the total information overload you are subjecting yourself to. I am not sure whether my own usage patterns are typical, but I find I am using Social and lifestreaming more than RSS Readers.

I have 1000s of unread items in my RSS readers, though on a lifestreaming service I am not reading every item either.

If the conversation is moving away from blogs there needs to be a way to measure it, track it and possibly respond to it.

I still am not sure how to react to the new item sharing feature introduced today on Blogcatalog, where someone can share items to people following them on the Dashboard, and to their Shared widget, and leave a comment.
When I first heard that this was going to be coming just a few days ago, I immediately thought that I would be vocally against it, but it is like a Stumbleupon review or a Delicious bookmark – it is not trying to start a new conversation, just tell someone why you are sharing the link.

The problem is that people will only share content using a certain number of different methods. Isn’t it best to use the one that is most likely to be seen across multiple networks?

Disclaimer: I consult a little with Blogcatalog

Update

After a little exploring it appears Friendfeed posted about this earlier on their blog and there is further coverage on Louis Gray

From the Bidvertiser Blog

To address this, we have now launched 3 unique solutions:

1. WordPress Plugin to allow you to seamlessly embed the BidVertiser Ads in your feeds. You can download the plugin from your publisher account.

2. Solution for FeedBurner that allows you to embed the BidVertiser Ads in your current FeedBurner address. Click here to learn more about the FeedBurner solution.

3. Solution for Blogger/Blogspot that allows you to embed the BidVertiser Ads in the footer of each of your post feeds. Click here to learn more about the Blogger solution.

This now makes Bidvertiser feed advertising a much more viable solution

This means that they totally blow Feedburner Email subscription away as far as features are concerned.

Apart from one important aspect.

Exclusive: Aweber Will Soon Report Email Sububscriber Numbers To Feedburner

In the announcement Justin Premick mentioned

This is just one of a number of enhancements we’ll be making to the Blog Broadcast tool. Stay tuned…

I probed a little deeper and we can expect to have counts reported to Feedburner in the near future, but no specific time frame.

What Does This Mean To The Blogosphere?

Internet marketers who concentrate on email subscriptions from their blog using Aweber will soon be able to benefit from the same social proof as if they were RSS subscribers. I know a few marketers that previously only had a few thousand RSS subscribers who will suddenly be propelled into similar subscriber counts as… Techcrunch 600k+

I think that shakes public perception up a little

A Confession About Feedblitz

Feedblitz also have this capability and a bunch of cool features, and I exchanged emails with Phil Hollows 1st December after an exchange of comments both here in the past, and on Problogger.
There seem to be a number of ways that Feedblitz could meet my needs for email in the same or similar way to Aweber, though it might take a little work with existing scripts

I really need to spend some time on full evaluation, but my house move and subsequent lack or intermittent connectivity has disrupted my workflow.

First up, for those counting stats such as Darren Rowse, Robert Scoble and Techcrunch here are my numbers.

Google Reader is currently showing 3 different feeds that are all providing the same content, which you might think would be better served as a single number as appears in Feedburner.
Hopefully that will never, ever happen, as those split numbers are incredibly useful.

Why Are There Split Numbers?

It is vital to understand why split numbers occur to fully appreciate how useful this is.

There are 3 main ways people subscribe to your RSS feeds using Google Reader.

1. Using A Subscription Button

   My subscription buttons point to andybeard.eu/feed/ and this is the URL used by feed readers to collect my feed, even though that redirects to Feedburner using the Feedsmith plugin.

2. Autodiscovery

   This is that little orange icon that appears in your browser alongside the URL for RSS subscription. It is handled in different ways by various feed readers. Google Reader evaluates any redirect before you actually subscribe, thus you end up at feeds.feedburner.com/Exploring-Niche-Websites before making a decision. Historically speaking this isn’t a very good thing to happen, because as a feed publisher you “lose ownership” in some ways of those subscribers, as they are not subscribing to a page on your site that can be moved to somewhere else.

3. Javascript Bookmark

   This again uses the autodiscovery URL in the header of your blog, but for some reason, maybe my own oversight or mistake my autodiscovery URL is andybeard.eu/feed – notice this URL doesn’t have a trailing slash.

RSS Feed Subscription – Evaluation

This is where we gain a unique perspective on Feed Subscription

1. 580 people are subscribed to http://andybeard.eu/feed/ – those people used a subscription button to subscribe to my feed.
2. 196 people are subscribed to http://feeds.feedburner.com/Exploring-Niche-Websites – those are either very long-time subscribers from my time on blogspot, or they used RSS Autodiscovery to subscribe using Google Reader
3. 146 people are subscribed to http://andybeard.eu/feed – those people most likely used a javascript based subscription button in Firefox to subscribe to my feed.

Now if you are very smart, you could use this method to split test subscription methods, and rely on Feedburner for your aggregate data.

This isn’t an attempt to get on a list of SEO blogs or back-slapping.

In this post I am trying to highlight some unique information that no one has ever revealed before, and could be extremely useful.

This isn’t the same as tracking RSS subscriptions, in many ways it is better because the tracking only gives you a click on a button, and doesn’t give you anything from autodiscovery, losing half of the data.

I for one hope Google doesn’t “fix” this “problem” with aggregated feeds, because it could prove to be very useful.

They bring out interesting, useful, sometimes controversial or disruptive products, but they are certainly market leaders not the following pack.

In the case of RSSBrief, they are taking on an existing market, RSS Readers, and in many ways it seems they might also step into reputation management and RSS Search.

I have a feeling even Jason Calacanis is going to like RSSBrief because it will help him with reputation management for Mahalo… but when it is finished.

The closest I have seen to RSSBrief was Myfeedz, but that didn’t quite hit the mark for me, it might be better for other people. Myfeedz really gives an overview of the whole blogosphere.

RSSBrief tries to give an overview of specific blogs, or specific blog posts, extractng core details about the content – an “executive overview” to help you determine whether the full content is relevant.

Some people might argue that that is the purpose of an opening paragraph, but opening paragraphs are either lacking in specific information, or more often than not these days, carefully crafted to entice you to read the full article.

(more after the jump)

I offer full feeds but many people don’t, and opening paragraphs might not tell you what you need to know. That is a fake “after the jump” just to prove a point.

I wonder if PayPerPost will be presenting RSSBrief which is part of their Argus platform at Techcrunch40 – maybe they will get to come face-to-face with Google – just imagine if they won the top prize and having it presented by Google and Michael Arrington.
I haven’t seen a list of people presenting published – maybe having the PPP guys there would have been just too much to handle.

As Adam Ostrow notes on Mashable:-

On the plus side, the service does seem do a fairly good job of summarizing articles, but whether that is something customers are really looking for will remain to be seen.

He also notes it is an alpha, and you can’t enter your whole reading list – there is no way to log in at all.

I love seeing projects at this early stage, because it allows you to see the potential, and possibly shape it into something more useful.

Why I See Potential In RSSBrief?

I do see a lot of potential in RSSBrief, and not because I would consider the guys at PayPerPost to be friends, and they certainly don’t pay me anything to write about them.
You could class it in some ways as being payola, they have linked to me, featured me in their marketplace etc, but they haven’t to coin a phrase ‘bought my soul”.

So the first thing I am going to do in my writeup is criticise them, and quite strongly.

Here is the link to my page on RSSBrief

http://www.rssbrief.com/feeds/24

It absolutely sucks I am page number 24 and not page number 1

Techcrunch is page number 14

This is a little tongue in cheek, but there is a serious point to it, the URLs should be based around my URL

http://www.rssbrief.com/feeds/andybeard.eu

http://www.rssbrief.com/feeds/techcrunch.com

Here is why….

Summary Feeds

RSSBrief provides 2 kinds of RSS feed

A Full Feed http://www.rssbrief.com/entries/full_xml/24
A Summary Feed http://www.rssbrief.com/entries/summaries_xml/24

I absolutely hate the full feeds option currently, because it strips out all the formatting, and possibly doesn’t count as a feed subscriber with Feedburner. Guys it is ugly, and possibly pointless.

I love the summary feed with one caveat – the useless URL

http://www.rssbrief.com/entries/summaries_xml/24

That should read

http://www.rssbrief.com/entries/summaries_xml/andybeard.eu

That summary is actually something very useful I could even use on my blog or for various mashups, but even more useful would be a way to get a summary for a specific post.

I would love to be able to pull in a summary for each post into a sidebar section automatically, or to pull in summaries in some way for additional data on category archives etc.

For effective use, all data needs to be based around the actual URLs, and not numbers.

I am not a number

RSS brief isn’t a full grown application, it is a technology demo or alpha because it is suitable to be “played around with”, and I could actually use the summary feeds as it stands to add some value.

For some of those higher output blogs such as Techcrunch or Mashable, I could imagine subscribing just to the summaries.

I really wish they would change the URLs – they might currently reflect how they are being stored in the database, but end users will get a lot more benefit if they are more user friendly.

I also hope they are going to report subscribers through to Feedburner in some way (and also with their email service Zookoda)

Hmm Zookoda – I have a feeling Zookoda is going to be integrated with the Argus backend as well. Maybe we will see PayPerPost reporting subscription numbers to Feedburner, but we will also see PayPerPost competing directly with Feedburner, now owned by Google.

When I worte about Zookoda in the past, I hinted that something of this nature might be possible.

In some ways they are now a Feedburner competitor, which might make this a little complicated. If it doesn’t happen, I expect to see PayPerPost/Zookoda move into the feed syndication and statistics business extremely quickly.

Hmm statistics…

PayPerPost have already stated that they will have some fairly advanced tracking within Argus – they really need feed readership statistics to be able to offer advertisers. They can grab some of it via Feedburner API, but can also offer their own competing platform.

PayPerPost To Directly Compete With Feedburner and Google Reader?

Thus the title of this post, it is pure speculation, but PayPerPost do have the funding to pull it off, it makes 100% business sense, they have the attention of a large blogger audience, and they will provide a feed reading experience that will be attractive not just for bloggers, but also professional businesses.
They might not be able to pull people away from Feedburner – they don’t have to, they can offer a parallel service that offers value, and will gain uptake.

As long as it could be tracked, I would add an additional feed subscription for the RSSBrief summaries, and I feel other people would as well.

Zookoda’s email offering isn’t perfect, but it is free, will offer advertising revenue in the future, and is more likely to be developed than Feedbuner’s

Despite my highlighting of Feedburner’s problems in the past, they have done nothing to rectify any of the things I highlighted that is immediately visible, even a simple thing such as adding a small text addition to outgoing emails for CAN-SPAM conformance.

Ok, so they are now Google, and Google can probably get away with a lot of things that smaller companies can’t. Who after all is going to take Google to court for a spam complaint?

Can you tell I am excited about the direction PayPerPost is taking this – their business model has always been disruption, they are going to do it again.

Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others

10 months ago I fired off a heated debate about RSS sharing, and how Google with it’s easy to share feeds could be killing the future of RSS.
Now I say I fired it off, but honestly it would have been a storm in a teacup without Robert Scoble taking part with one of his most controversial headlines.
I think I had about 30 subscribers at the time.

Today Robert is championing the Bill of Rights he signed up for, but unfortunately Google Reader and Google’s recently purchased Feedburner don’t support the level of control over your feeds to allow Robert, and his friends wishes to be fulfilled, and they really only have their selves to blame, for championing Google Reader without encouraging Google to allow for self determination of what happens with the data.

RSS Sharing – Path of Discovery

I already knew that RSS could be protected using RSS Authentication, and that was something Google doesn’t support, but Bloglines does, and they block your ability to share authenticated feeds. +1 Bloglines

Open Social Web is really about applications such as Facebook, and my voyage of discovery into content access control in Facebook actually started quite by accident about a week ago.

Facebook provides a way to get your notification by RSS

The URL looks like this

http://www.facebook.com/feeds/notifications.php?id=576942190&viewer=576942190&key=10characterkey&format=rss20

Google Reader allows you to add that feed, and share it

Shared item uses javascript, though I could easily also feed it to anywhere, such as a WordPress blog

I could have also shared it in a primary shared feed totally by accident.
Now there currently isn’t any really private information in there, other than allowing others to know who my friends are, and who I am communicating with, but then you wouldn’t want to share your email headers either…

Being allowed to share data doesn’t mean it should be as easy as hitting a hotkey when reading a “river of news”

I Appologise To My Facebook Friends

I will remove the sharing in 24 hours, but I feel it is important to use real data to demonstrate this point because for some reason 99% of the tech industry just didn’t understand it 10 months ago.

Facebook & Bloglines Understand it

Facebook point to their help information on notifications

Lets take a look at what Facebook think about sharing and privacy, and why they implemented specific security measures.

Does this mean that everyone can see all my notes now?

No. Each person that can see your notes on Facebook is given a different RSS or Atom feed URL that is unique for them. Only the notes that they are allowed to see will be syndicated via that URL. If you change your privacy settings or friend links, then all the feeds will be appropriately updated.

Unfortunately those people can share those links by accident

Won’t Bloglines and other similar services make my notes content searchable by the world if my friends enter the URL for my Notes feed into those services?

Atom and RSS feeds from Facebook include the Bloglines Feed Access Control extension , and we set the access parameter to “deny” for all of our feeds. We also indicate in our robots.txt that feeds should not be visited or indexed by bots. The major aggregators and search engines (Bloglines, Technorati, Google, Yahoo!) all appear to respect these directives. If you are very concerned about the possibility of someone seeing your notes that you don’t want him or her to see, we’ve added a privacy option that you can set on your notes privacy page which will prevent any of your Notes from being syndicated in any RSS or Atom feed.

The major search engines do support Robots.txt, though I am not sure robots.txt would be sufficient to stop someone hacking.

Bloglines Feed Access Control extension was introduced last August, and it seems no one in the Technology blogging world really took an interest.
Google Reader certainly doesn’t support it as I have proven above.

People can make all this content searchable by mistake, broadcast it on Twitter etc

Doesn’t providing different URLs to every person that views my notes create inefficiency because services that do aggregation will have to retrieve and store my Notes from multiple feeds?

Yes. This is the only way that we can maintain your privacy settings on a per-viewer basis.

Facebook (and Bloglines) seem to be very keen to support privacy and choice, but Google Reader by not supporting “access:restriction relationship” seems to think privacy (and copyright) is a waste of time.

access:restriction relationship=”deny”

Feedburner is now owned by Google and you would expect them to treat all services the same, and to support initiatives that give content owners a choice in what happens to their content.

They have an interface to allow introduction of sharing control within Feedburner, but for some reason only support the blocking of sharing with a service provided by a Google competitor, Yahoo Pipes.

This adds the following code to your feed, and I currently have on my feed, though I will probably switch back.

<xhtml:meta xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" name="robots" content="noindex" /><meta xmlns="http://pipes.yahoo.com" name="pipes" content="noprocess" />

this means that it is not indexed, but all links are still followed (so links back to the feed still give me some juice), and is meant to prevent someone using your content in Yahoo Pipes.

Of course it doesn’t….

Once any content enters Google Reader, it can be tagged and filtered automatically, and Google Reader doesn’t include any of the access controls.

I have fed my protected feed into Google Reader, and then shared it
It took me 2 minutes to set that up and is realistically unblockable – any splogger using Google Reader cannot be prevented from taking your content and feeding their “Made for Adsense” sites.

Facebook Opening Up?

Actually they are already wide open, because the various feed readers other than Bloglines are not supporting their controls.
The announcement today of limited search ability doesn’t matter, someone could easily program an app that would allow people to share everything and have everything searchable, without seeking permission from those sharing.

Ownership and Control of RSS Content

10 months ago everyone seemed perfectly happy to slam me and tell me that I was wrong. The tech blogging fraternity thought at that time that once something is in RSS format, you should no longer have control of it, and have no legal right to complain about other people using it.

The more creatively and more personal RSS feeds become, the more control the owners of that content need for how that content is used, either on purpose, or by mistake.
It shouldn’t be possible to hit a hotkey and share Facebook content with 50,000 subscribers, but it is currently possible.

This is about choice, and privacy

This also isn’t the only problem with Feedburner as as I pointed out when Feedburner were purchased by Google.

Update

I have now switched to using a screenshot rather than a live Javascript feed to improve privacy a little