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?
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