Today we announce AdClimate, a new feature of the formidable FeedBurner ad server for blogs and RSS feeds. AdClimate gives marketers and advertisers the power to suppress their ads from being served into content they might deem questionable. By way of example, let's say you have an aversion to the word, "wingnut" and the thought of your ad for pinenuts showing up in a publisher's blog post about the history of wingnuts would be totally unacceptable (hey - who are we to judge?) AdClimate to the rescue. In addition to screening a multi-language default list of inappropriate language, advertisers can submit their own list of keywords next to which they don't want their ad to appear - wingnuts and all. AdClimate is the solution for that awkward adjacency issue that makes advertisers and media planners sink a little lower in their chairs (kind of like lumbar support, but without the foam cushion or unfashionable belt).
If there’s one thing we can say about the content produced by our 393,805 publishers, it's diverse and, some might say, unpredictable. For advertisers, having an extra layer of protection is just the lifevest they need before jumping into the deep end of all that content generated by users. And when we say deep, we’re talking about hundreds of millions of ad impressions from some of the coolest, most provocative and cutting-edge content producers on the Web today. You know who you are.
In the world of distributed media, brands need to be protected which is why the AdClimate concept has been met with very positive feedback from agency execs across the land. One such exec is Tim Hanlon, Senior Vice President, Ventures, at Denuo, the media futures arm of Publicis Groupe who had this to say, "Despite the wealth of quality user-generated content on the Web today, many marketers are still wary of promoting their brands amid the unpredictable landscape of blogs and RSS feeds. As the pioneer in feed-based syndication and advertising services, FeedBurner understands this environment better than anyone, and this advanced form of protection will be an effective measure to address marketer concerns -- ultimately enabling more ad dollars to flow into the distributed media space."
We couldn't have said it better ourselves. AdClimate allows advertisers to reach increasingly fragmented audiences as they turn to new content sources like RSS feeds and blogs, with access to hundreds of millions of new ad impressions. That's good news for ye publishers.
So, who’s afraid of blog and RSS feed advertising? No one now. Learn more about AdClimate or contact a friendly FeedBurner ad person to discuss your campaign needs.
Brand on.
Ajax has been a hot topic for quite a while now, and there seems to be a new book with the eponymous Greek warrior in its title pretty much every week. Coming in at just 207 pages, Jeremy Keith’s new book, Bulletproof Ajax, is the latest to join the fray. With only 200 odd pages how does he plan to cover such a complex subject you may be asking? Well, here’s the secret - Ajax is really quite simple when you get down to it.
Jeremy’s previous book, DOM Scripting, stands as a fantastic introduction to JavaScript in general and DOM Scripting in particular and Bulletproof Ajax follows on from that title to some degree. Although you get a short introduction to the JavaScript language it’s just enough to understand the examples (I’d recommend you have at least a passing knowledge of JavaScript before reading this book). Also if you are coming to Ajax as a server side programmer then this book is probably not what you’re looking for, but worth reading at a later date. Given the client-server nature of Ajax there are server-side code examples (in PHP) but these are generally brief and serve only to support the examples rather than look at real world usage. Again, it would be useful to have at least a passing familiarity with a server side language and to be able to know if you already have a web server handy to experiment with.
The book features plenty of sample projects - for instance a simple address book is built up, showing off how to use XML, JSON and HTML as data sources and introducing the central XMLHTTPRequest object. There’s lots of focus, as you would expect, on making these examples bulletproof, in this case making sure they work even if JavaScript is unavailable using a method called Hijax.
To go from simple inline event handlers through to completely unobtrusive, object-based code and discussions of closures in JavaScript would be pretty good going for a book twice the size. It’s testament to the clear, no-nonsense and eminently readable writing style that this never bogs down the examples. Some people are bound to complain about the use of the proprietary innerHTML property and the minimal coverage of XML and JSON in the larger examples. This seems to be a facet of the scope of the book and a pragmatic approach to the problem rather than an unintentional oversight. If you’re looking for an A-Z of building an enterprise Ajax application then you’re probably looking for another book (but you should read this one first anyway!).
An entire chapter is dedicated to Accessibility and Ajax, a hugely important subject and one I’ve not seen mentioned anywhere else to date. Although the chapter lacks equivocal conclusions (mainly because no one seems to have formed any yet) it raises all the important issues for discussion and debate and provides a solid set of references for further reading. Throughout the book everything is anchored on the importance of user experience, rather than simply using technology for technology’s sake; this makes Bulletproof Ajax stand out from the crowd of more technology-focused tomes on the subject.
As a standards savvy developer if you want to get up to speed quickly with the hows and whys of modern Ajax but don’t have the time to wade through an awful lot of blog posts then Bulletproof Ajax is worthwhile reading. If you already know what you’re up to then it’s a perfect book to recommend to your unenlightened colleagues. A perfectly digestible read for one of those long train journeys!
Book Name: Bulletproof Ajax
Publisher: New Riders
Author: Jeremy Keith
URL: http://bulletproofajax.com
Price: $34.99 USD
Rating out of 5: 3.5
Ajax has been a hot topic for quite a while now, and there seems to be a new book with the eponymous Greek warrior in its title pretty much every week. Coming in at just 207 pages, Jeremy Keith’s new book, Bulletproof Ajax, is the latest to join the fray. With only 200 odd pages how does he plan to cover such a complex subject you may be asking? Well, here’s the secret - Ajax is really quite simple when you get down to it.
Jeremy’s previous book, DOM Scripting, stands as a fantastic introduction to JavaScript in general and DOM Scripting in particular and Bulletproof Ajax follows on from that title to some degree. Although you get a short introduction to the JavaScript language it’s just enough to understand the examples (I’d recommend you have at least a passing knowledge of JavaScript before reading this book). Also if you are coming to Ajax as a server side programmer then this book is probably not what you’re looking for, but worth reading at a later date. Given the client-server nature of Ajax there are server-side code examples (in PHP) but these are generally brief and serve only to support the examples rather than look at real world usage. Again, it would be useful to have at least a passing familiarity with a server side language and to be able to know if you already have a web server handy to experiment with.
The book features plenty of sample projects - for instance a simple address book is built up, showing off how to use XML, JSON and HTML as data sources and introducing the central XMLHTTPRequest object. There’s lots of focus, as you would expect, on making these examples bulletproof, in this case making sure they work even if JavaScript is unavailable using a method called Hijax.
To go from simple inline event handlers through to completely unobtrusive, object-based code and discussions of closures in JavaScript would be pretty good going for a book twice the size. It’s testament to the clear, no-nonsense and eminently readable writing style that this never bogs down the examples. Some people are bound to complain about the use of the proprietary innerHTML property and the minimal coverage of XML and JSON in the larger examples. This seems to be a facet of the scope of the book and a pragmatic approach to the problem rather than an unintentional oversight. If you’re looking for an A-Z of building an enterprise Ajax application then you’re probably looking for another book (but you should read this one first anyway!).
An entire chapter is dedicated to Accessibility and Ajax, a hugely important subject and one I’ve not seen mentioned anywhere else to date. Although the chapter lacks equivocal conclusions (mainly because no one seems to have formed any yet) it raises all the important issues for discussion and debate and provides a solid set of references for further reading. Throughout the book everything is anchored on the importance of user experience, rather than simply using technology for technology’s sake; this makes Bulletproof Ajax stand out from the crowd of more technology-focused tomes on the subject.
As a standards savvy developer if you want to get up to speed quickly with the hows and whys of modern Ajax but don’t have the time to wade through an awful lot of blog posts then Bulletproof Ajax is worthwhile reading. If you already know what you’re up to then it’s a perfect book to recommend to your unenlightened colleagues. A perfectly digestible read for one of those long train journeys!
Book Name: Bulletproof Ajax
Publisher: New Riders
Author: Jeremy Keith
URL: http://bulletproofajax.com
Price: $34.99 USD
Rating out of 5: 3.5
Ajax has been a hot topic for quite a while now, and there seems to be a new book with the eponymous Greek warrior in its title pretty much every week. Coming in at just 207 pages, Jeremy Keith's new book, Bulletproof Ajax, is the latest to join the fray. With only 200 odd pages how does he plan to cover such a complex subject you may be asking? Well, here's the secret - Ajax is really quite simple when you get down to it.
Jeremy's previous book, DOM Scripting, stands as a fantastic introduction to JavaScript in general and DOM Scripting in particular and Bulletproof Ajax follows on from that title to some degree. Although you get a short introduction to the JavaScript language it's just enough to understand the examples (I'd recommend you have at least a passing knowledge of JavaScript before reading this book). Also if you are coming to Ajax as a server side programmer then this book is probably not what you're looking for, but worth reading at a later date. Given the client-server nature of Ajax there are server-side code examples (in PHP) but these are generally brief and serve only to support the examples rather than look at real world usage. Again, it would be useful to have at least a passing familiarity with a server side language and to be able to know if you already have a web server handy to experiment with.
The book features plenty of sample projects - for instance a simple address book is built up, showing off how to use XML, JSON and HTML as data sources and introducing the central XMLHTTPRequest object. There's lots of focus, as you would expect, on making these examples bulletproof, in this case making sure they work even if JavaScript is unavailable using a method called Hijax.
To go from simple inline event handlers through to completely unobtrusive, object-based code and discussions of closures in JavaScript would be pretty good going for a book twice the size. It's testament to the clear, no-nonsense and eminently readable writing style that this never bogs down the examples. Some people are bound to complain about the use of the proprietary innerHTML property and the minimal coverage of XML and JSON in the larger examples. This seems to be a facet of the scope of the book and a pragmatic approach to the problem rather than an unintentional oversight. If you're looking for an A-Z of building an enterprise Ajax application then you're probably looking for another book (but you should read this one first anyway!).
An entire chapter is dedicated to Accessibility and Ajax, a hugely important subject and one I've not seen mentioned anywhere else to date. Although the chapter lacks equivocal conclusions (mainly because no one seems to have formed any yet) it raises all the important issues for discussion and debate and provides a solid set of references for further reading. Throughout the book everything is anchored on the importance of user experience, rather than simply using technology for technology's sake; this makes Bulletproof Ajax stand out from the crowd of more technology-focused tomes on the subject.
As a standards savvy developer if you want to get up to speed quickly with the hows and whys of modern Ajax but don't have the time to wade through an awful lot of blog posts then Bulletproof Ajax is worthwhile reading. If you already know what you're up to then it's a perfect book to recommend to your unenlightened colleagues. A perfectly digestible read for one of those long train journeys!
Book Name: Bulletproof Ajax
Publisher: New Riders
Author: Jeremy Keith
URL: http://bulletproofajax.com
Price: $34.99 USD
Rating out of 5: 3.5
For those of you playing the FeedBurner Around the World game, please place your left hand on the "Flame Thrower" square while we take a moment to catch everyone else up.
Unbeknownst to the lot of us who've been contentedly minding our stats, stockpiling our reserve of Headline Animators, and tending to our FeedFlare gardens, FeedBurner has quietly spread to the four corners of the earth. For real. We have resellers in Japan, Spain and Russia, our customer base includes thousands upon thousands of feeds from publishers all over the world and our flame-o-con burns brightly for millions of subscribers in 190 different countries. It's irresistable — even Ewan and Charley plotted their route straight through picturesque FeedBurner Country. (Hey, that movie looks familiar.)
In the spirit of at least one burned feed for every online publisher, we are proud to announce the latest enhancement to the FeedBurner.com site: Multilingual support for Brazilian Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. (Stand by for German, Italian, and French, coming soon from the FeedBurner Reparto di Romanze Sprachen et Patisserie). Today, if you enter our site via FeedBurner.es or FeedBurner.ru, you will see FeedBurner in either Spanish or Russian, respectively. To view all language options, select your choice from the new Languages page. (Note our CEO's transformation into the formidable Ricardo “la Perla de Oaxaca” Costolo.)
We would especially like to thank our fine community of translators (a full list appears below). These talented folks localized (and continue to localize - we change things a lot around here!) our site content and then passed the baton to our in-house team, Matt, John, and Alden who then brought it all home. There's still a long way to go, so if you would like to lend your skills to the multilingual cause, let us know today. We're especially interested in Dutch, Chinese, and Hindi. And Klingon. Having spent some time in Canada, we're hoping to be able to do the Canadian English version here in-house. Analyse, Optimise, Publicise, Monetise, and let's not forget - Troubleshootise. Doon. Eh-to-Zed.
And now, those aforementioned propers:
Brazilian Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
FeedBurner Japan is also seeing more advertising dollars flowing into our ad network for blogs and RSS feeds, no doubt due to this clever ad.
Sayonara. Adios. Ciao. tlhIngan jIHbe'!
David Churbuck's recent post imploring bloggers to publish full feeds reminded me that I've been meaning to comment on this for a while. It's a subject I speak on regularly at SES, and some of the recommendations I make are not the same ones you see made on a number of blogs.
First of all, I think the primary justification often given for partial feeds - that it will drive higher clickthroughs back to the publisher's site - is off-base. As people subscribe to feeds, they subscribe to more feeds. And that means they're consuming more content, which means that each click out of the feed reader is taking the reader away from more content. In other words, feed reading is consumption-oriented, not transactionally focused. We've seen no evidence that excerpts on their own drive higher clickthroughs.
Secondly, the reason many larger publishers give for trying to steer traffic back to the site is that they can make money on the site. Guess what? You can monetize feeds as well - giving you the option of deciding where and how you want to monetize your audience, instead of assuming that the feed's sole purpose is to drive traffic back to your site (which is a dubious proposition anyway).
I did an interview on Monday where the podcaster asked me how to make feeds "stickier". What he was actually asking was how to get readers more engaged with feed content: how can feeds be made more interactive? A lot of the thinking behind FeedFlare was that we needed a way to give publishers tools to increase the likelihood that readers would in fact engage. Clicking through to read a copy of the post they just read is unlikely to drive a lot of click activity. But clicking through to read the comments will. Bookmarking the post at del.icio.us will drive further activity, as will voting for the post at Digg. (And in those latter examples, they'll both increase secondary traffic growth, by building awareness of your content at those sites.) In other words, adding opportunities for the readers to do things other than just read a copy of the post goes a long way to increasing the probability that the readers will actually do something.
Too few publishers take advantage of the next logical step: building their own FeedFlare units to direct attention to other parts of the publisher's site. If you publish archives by category, why not give readers the ability to browse more articles like the one they just read by going to the category archive? Promoting an event? Do what the folks at TechPresident are doing and include a link to the event with every post:
That link gets seen by everyone subscribed to the feed, dramatically increasing the visibility of the Personal Democracy Forum event (disclosure: I'm speaking at PdF, and FeedBurner's a sponsor). Creating this FeedFlare takes less than five minutes, and it's then something you can share with anyone else who wants to support the event. (I won't go into all the variations here, but creating FeedFlares for fundraising, micro-sites for a specific function, etc., all make a ton of sense. You get the idea.) At this point, the feed is not just a way of distributing content, but is equally about driving awareness and delivering actions - just not all focused exclusively on the individual post.
There's another angle to publishing full feeds that doesn't get a lot of attention: the value of links contained in the posts themselves. Sites like TechMeme do a great job of finding links between blog posts and giving heavily-linked posts more visibility. Aggregators can (but often don't) use these links in interesting ways. Three years ago, I wrote about my favorite feature of my preferred aggregator at the time (SharpReader) - threaded RSS. I would absolutely love to see this feature implemented in Google Reader, where I could navigate through my subscriptions by seeing what links the posts had in common... it would add tremendous value to the interface, and expose connections between posts that are otherwise all but impossible to glean from casual browsing.
FeedDemon fans will be happy to see that Nick Bradbury has added a pretty slick feature to the latest FeedDemon beta called "Popular Topics". Here's a screen shot from FeedDemon 2.5, showing one of the most-linked-to posts across my 200 subscriptions:
In addition, FeedDemon also shows you the most linked-to posts across the NewsGator Online user base, which is a great way to leverage the NewsGator community to surface interesting content you might not otherwise see.
My personal wishlist aside, the value of the full post is that it exposes the links between the posts in the feed and other posts out on the web. These links are sometimes (and, I predict, increasingly will be) leveraged by other services and applications, which can generate additional exposure for your content. Which is sort of why you're publishing a feed in the first place, right?
In a match made in distributed media heaven, the City by the Bay's leading newspaper has hooked up with the Windy City's one and only FeedBurner. SFGate, the online edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, has burned a few hundred feeds, blogs and podcasts, and is now contributing inventory to FeedBurner's ad network for blogs and RSS feeds.
“As one of the first major newspapers to have a Web presence in 1994, SFGate has maintained its commitment to offering valuable Internet services and we continue this tradition by improving the way we distribute news and information,” said Peter Negulescu, Vice President, Digital Media, SFGate.com. “FeedBurner’s analytics reveal a significant percentage of our readers consume content through our RSS feeds, so this deal signifies a logical extension of our overall content strategy. The online advertising revenue opportunity is very promising.”
As the number one newspaper site in Northern California, SF Gate delivers top news stories in addition to popular features such as The Daily Dish!, Mark Morford's Notes & Errata, Tech Talk, the Oakland A's and the San Francisco Giants feeds. Whether you're sittin' on the dock of the bay or sittin' on servers in Silicon Valley, SFGate has feeds for everyone. Far out!
SFGate has also added FeedBurner's groovy FeedFlare service to engage readers with links that make it simple to share individual entries. We like to make it easy to spread the love. Check out today's announcement for the whole story on the SFGate and FeedBurner partnership.
FeedBurner will be working with AOL to manage hundreds of the company's RSS, podcast and video feeds consisting of news, sports and entertainment content. Additionally, all Time Warner properties including HBO, New Line Cinema, Time Inc. and Warner Bros. Entertainment can take advantage of FeedBurner's services. We like open floodgates around here, so long as the servers stay dry.
We'll be providing AOL with detailed analytics about how its content is consumed beyond the AOL Web site -- such as within widgets, in feed readers and on blogs -- to help them accurately measure influence wherever their content is consumed.
AOL joins a long list of established brands, including Dow Jones Online, Geffen Records, and USATODAY, who are using our super-powered FeedFoundry service, i.e, our enterprise-strength feed management offering for aggregating, analyzing and reporting distributed media activity across large numbers of RSS feeds. FeedFoundry allows publishers to monitor audience engagement and make real-time adjustments that improve the reach and profitability of distributed media. The scalability of the FeedFoundry service even provides detailed trend data across categories and properties.
The company also plans to take advantage of our innovative FeedFlare service, the easiest method for infusing social media services like del.icio.us, Facebook, and Netscape into every feed item. For more information about FeedFoundry, FeedFlare, or any FeedBurner services, please contact our Publisher Services team.