Category: RSS Tools

It was just a matter of time, but Bloglines has added advertisements to their site. When I went to read my feeds this morning, there was an ad for T-Mobile right on the starting page:

I’ve long wondered just where Bloglines was getting revenue to support itself — it didn’t make sense to me that IAC Search & Media, its owner, was keeping Bloglines running to make my blogreading life easier. So far, I haven’t noticed advertisements on individual post or folder pages. Could those be far behind?
Interestingly, the advertisement I was shown was managed by…. DoubleClick. Which Google acquired in March 2008. Now, it seems, whether you use Google Reader or Bloglines, you’re putting advertising dollars into the Big G’s pocket.

Do you ever subscribe to RSS feeds that have huge amounts of information, just to get the occasional post that mentions a particular topic or two? Yeah, me too. FeedSifter is just the tool for us. Enter an RSS feed URL and one or more words or phrases, and it will build you a version of the RSS feed that contains only entries matching one or more of your requested words. It allows for basic Boolean searching. Words or phrases entered on one line are joined by “AND”; words or phrases on separate lines are joined by “OR.”
A few examples:

• New York Times sports news about the Red Sox
• CNN Top Stories that contain either ‘McCain’ and ‘Obama’ (both words) or contain the word ‘elections’
• RSS4Lib posts that mention FeedSifter (nicely recursive, huh?)

The resulting page is, itself, an RSS feed that you can subscribe to in your aggregator or save as a live bookmark in your browser. Or incorporate the sifted feed into a web page using Google’s RSS embedding tool. I can see an obvious use for this tool at the library reference desk. This makes an easy way to set up a quick-and-dirty current awareness feed for patrons, based on news services or journal table of contents, that can tell them when something new has been published in a narrow area.

Paul Pival at The Distant Librarian noted a tool from Google that I had not been aware of: the Dynamic Feed Control Wizard, a JavaScript that you can embed in your web site to pull in RSS headlines and summaries from your favorite sites.

Give it a keyword and it will find matching feeds; pick one, and it gives you the JavaScript to display that code in a vertical or horizontal box on your site. I’m showing a screen shot of the set-up interface here:

This is a very handy tool for grabbing a single feed and placing it on a web page; it could be very useful for libraries that do not have an abundance of technical expertise but have a blog they want to include elsewhere on the site.

One part of Google’s interface confused me (odd, as Google is usually so clever at interfaces). When entering a “Feed Expression”, Google will not take an RSS feed’s URL. It expects you to type keywords describing your feed, and it will figure out the actual feed URL. So entering my feed’s URL (http://www.rss4lib.com/index.xml) did nothing; entering simply “RSS4Lib” produced the feed.

Sample

Visit the full text of this entry to see what the code looks like embedded in a web page: Google Has an RSS Embedding Tool.

Continue reading “Google Has an RSS Embedding Tool”

Figuring out how much bang you’re getting for your blogging effort is not as simple as it first seems. While it’s relatively straightforward to calculate readership of static Web pages on your server, making a similar estimate of syndicated content readership is much trickier. (For an exploration of that topic, see my 2007 blog post, “Counting RSS Subscribers,” and the feedstats application I built to estimate out how many people might be reading RSS4Lib.)
The trick, of course, is when you “free” your content via syndication formats, it becomes harder to tell at a glance how much those syndicated files are being read. This is a problem for libraries, as for any other business operation, because library managers need information about the effect of their publicity and public relations efforts to justify them.
With the goal of creating a tool to help bloggers, library bloggers in particular, quantify their feed readership, I created a version of my older RSS4Lib-specific tool for general use: YourStats.
YourStats parses a log file and generates an estimate of total “direct” readership (that is, readership of the feed itself). It summarizes readership reported by aggregators like Bloglines and counts unique IP addresses for PC-based readers (such as Firefox or NetNewsWire). Of course, individual blog posts often far afield, being reproduced in other systems that do not report readership numbers. Other tools, such as Magpie (the RSS feed cacher) or Yahoo! Pipes, almost certainly redistribute your content to many other readers but do so in completely opaque ways. This sort of readership is not included in YourStats.
A couple notes:

• If you use Movable Type or WordPress to power your blog, and your RSS and Atom feeds have the default names, the application will take your log file and process it, giving results for both RSS (index.xml or feed=rss2) and Atom (atom.xml and feed=atom) readership.
• You can specify a different feed by entering its directory path and filename (for example, if your blog’s RSS feed is at http://your.blog.com/stuff/feed.xml, you would enter /stuff/feed.xml.
• YourStats only handles Apache standard log files.

I hope YourStats will provide you with quantifiable numbers around your blog’s readership. Try it and let me know what you think.

How do you read your RSS feeds? Chances are, you use either Bloglines or Google Reader, the two market leaders. A recent report, ‘Google Reader Slowly Closing on Bloglines‘ by Heather Hopkins of Hitwise shows how the gap is closing:

Hitwise doesn’t show market share of blog readers directly, but market share of total internet usage; according to this calculation, Bloglines has a 40% lead on Google reader’s market share of internet visits.
These stats are more or less mirrored on RSS4Lib. Looking at my user stats for May 21, 2008, this blog had a total of 1851 feed subscribers, of whom 831 were from Bloglines and 568 were from Google Reader. (See my Counting RSS Subscribers post from a year ago where I discuss my methodology.) This translates into Bloglines having a 44.9% share of my feed subscribers to Google’s 30.1% share, or 49% more than Google. Netvibes is 3rd for aggregators among RSS4lib subscribers (with an almost 13% share of RSS4Lib feed subscribers), while Rojo (3rd overall, according to Hitwise) is a far distant contender for RSS4Lib readers with 8 subscribers.
I’m a diehard Bloglines user myself but I see myself slipping into the minority. What tool do you use, and why?

According to a recent press release,

The catch — there’s always a catch — is that you need Tivo Desktop Plus on your Windows PC (sorry, Mac users) to get the material from your PC to your TiVo. So I won’t be testing it any time soon. This marks another move forward in getting Internet podcast content onto the family room TV, though it’s not as easy as it could be.

OCLC announced today that “Public WorldCat lists are available as RSS feeds that can be monitored using any RSS-capable service or software.” When you view a user’s list within WorldCat.org, you will be able to subscribe to an RSS feed for that list — so whenever that user adds an item to it, you’ll find out.
Libraries that use WorldCat.org lists to generate reading lists on various topics can now embed those lists easily and automatically on library web pages — and let their patrons know, at the same time, that there are new items of interest.
So, for example, I’ve created a brief list of books about RSS. You can subscribe to its feed at http://worldcat.org/profiles/varnumk/lists/53691/rss. Whenever I add a new item to the list, you’ll know. If you go to my list in WorldCat (it’s called "RSS4Lib RSS List"), the RSS link OCLC provides redirects you to AddThis.com, a site that provides one-click subscription or one-click bookmarking links to a wide range of RSS aggregators and social bookmarking services.

The February 2008 issue of Wired magazine offers an interactive graphical depiction of what happens to your blog post once you click the publish button. "The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits — to You" shows all the interactions between the blogger, the aggregator, spam blogs, and (the whole point, right?) the reader. The Flash graphic depicts all these interactions and makes somewhat clearer how your post gets to wherever it’s ultimately consumed.

Ellyssa Kroski, in her iLibrarian blog, notes a list of “ 25 Awesome Beta Research Tools from Libraries Around the World.” The list includes some things I’ve heard of, such as MIT’s VERA and the University of Virginia’s Blacklight, and some others that are new to me.