River of news is (RSS feed reader) now a flood and how not to drown in it
. In the early days RSS was a geeky protocol and most people did not understand what it was or what it did. Also at the time it seemed very difficult for people to explain what a news feed was without making it sound even more confusing.
River of news
A good analogy is a river of news, it’s classed as news because you get the information as it happens. The river analogy works because a feed is being updated regularly with new information. It may even be better to think of fish in a river as the feed items as you can pick out the fish that you want to read. Not to confuse fish with news items as you couldn’t read a fish, maybe the fish is carrying a small pouch with the news in it.
Flood of news
Over time more and more web publishers have created feeds for their site which means that there are now more feeds to subscribe to. I now subscribe to 77 feeds (I had to unsubscribe from some) which publish at least 1 post a day so that’s a lot of items to read. This has now become a flood of information and now rather than saving time I find I spend way too long with my head in a feed reader.
How to prevent being drowned in news
To stop your feed reader making you less productive you can do a few things to make you feed reading sessions more productive.
- Unsubscribe from feeds you no longer enjoy reading or are not helping you, not this feed of course.
- Rather than read every post skim the titles for items you may be interested in.
- Organise your feeds into groups or folders so that different subjects are together.
- Use a service like RSS brief that summarises posts.
Following these tips will help to tame the deluge. What would be great is a service that reviews several feeds on a similar topic and then chooses the best items that are then aggregated into a single feed. Something like an human editor for RSS feeds.
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FeedGhost contest winner
First off we have a winner for the years subscription to FeedGhost. The winner is Pierro Marie, congratulations Pierro who suggested I blog about how to add advertising into your RSS feed and how to protect RSS feeds.
eBay RSS experiment
A while ago I mentioned that I was experimenting with SimplePie (I love SimplePie) and eBay RSS feeds. I have put together a very simple site about handbags (don’t ask) using an installation of SimplePie and ebay RSS feeds. The feeds can include your affiliate ID so if someone clicks on one of the auctions you display on your site and buys you get a commission.
Well it’s been over 2 months now and the site is indexed in Google and gets some traffic. I have recently updated the site to include more feeds, a feed for each type of handbag. It will take a while for Google to crawl these deeper pages but in principle you can create a viable site using RSS feeds.
If anyone wants to try it themselves you can download a free copy of SimplePie and get your custom ebay feeds. If you want to get commissions from ebay you’ll need to sign up with Commission Junction as they run ebay’s affiliate program.
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If you listen to podcasts you are probably subscribed using your favourite RSS reader, I have already talked about which is the best RSS reader. Whilst this is fine it’s not the best way to handle podcast RSS attachments. Things like pictures, video and sound files are not actually enclosed within the feed itself so these files need to be downloaded from the webhost’s server.
Juice Receiver
The best way to manage podcasts is to use a specialist program that will manage your subscriptions and download any new podcast files. Juice Receiver does just that and is currently the best free RSS podcast reader. It is free and there is a version for both Windows and the Apple Mac OS X.
Once installed the program sits in your toolbar and periodically checks for any new podcasts from the RSS feeds that you have subscribed to. The downloaded files are then saved onto your computer organised into named folders.
Juice Receiver is easy to use, you add new feeds, set the scheduler to check for new podcasts periodically and the let the program sit in your toolbar. You can force the program to check and download any new items if you can’t wait for Juice to check. Any downloaded audio files can be played via Juice Receiver.
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It looks like more and more bloggers are worrying about content theft. As RSS becomes more mainstream and a valuable metric this is making RSS news feeds a more visible target for lazy webmasters.
Just browsing through my feed reader I have found several Copyright notices appearing at the end of each feed entry. I am sure this sort of practice will become standard soon but why not get a jump on it and make sure you are protecting your RSS content.
Here are a few example to give you some ideas.
I have recently added a copyright notice to the feed for Newsniche. Included in the notice I have added a link back to the site and a link to the RSS feed.
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I’m sure you have already read about Blogrush, even though it was released this weekend every major blogger seems to have written about it. The reason it has become so popular is because it’s the next internet marketing bandwagon. It allows you to get traffic by displaying an RSS widget on your blog.
Adgregation
Blogrush works by displaying related items from RSS feeds within a widget that you display on your blog. In turn one of the items in your feed is displayed within the widget displayed on someone else’s blog. The idea is that you are syndicating your RSS feed on other blogs. I have even coined a new term for this, it’s called adgregation. RSS feeds aggregated together in what is essentially an ad.
Having related feed items displayed to your blog readers is a new spin on an old idea. As the widget only displays the RSS feed item title you are going to have to come up with some pretty eye catching headlines to attract click-through’s.
Referral program
There is also a referral program which allows you to recommend this widget to others and in return you will get your RSS headlines displayed a greater number of times (assuming they also install the widget).
Conclusion
Whilst the idea of the Blogrush widget can be potentially beneficial in driving traffic there are a couple of points you may want to consider. Mark over at 45n5 has raised the point that displaying the widget on a blog that carries Adsense may be against their terms of service. Secondly you may be giving up a large area of blog real estate for a currently unknown return. By all means test the service but be sure to remove it if it’s not working for you.
This post is from the Newsniche website and should not be reproduced elsewhere. Why not subscribe to the RSS feed and get this information delivered straight to your News reader.
You have spent valuable hours writing a post that you publish to your blog and RSS feed. You later discover your post has been republished on another site via your RSS feed. To make matters worse the site that stole your article is ranking higher than you. What do you do? Protect your RSS feed.
Why protect your feed
One of the biggest fears for RSS publishers is that their content will be stolen and republished on another site. This can mean in extreme case that the offending site is profiting financially and in terms of SERP’s of the back of your post.
How protect your feed
You can add a copyright notice to the end of each post in your feed. To do this you will need to be able to edit your RSS feed. If you are using WordPress then you can use this plugin from Smackfoo. It easily allows you to edit your own copyright notice that will automatically be added to the end of every feed. This notice will only apper in your RSS feed and not on your site.
Another option if you don not use a common blogging platform that offers plugins is to use FeedBurners feed flare. You can find the feed flare option under the optimize tab in your Feedburner control panel. You can add a line of code into the add new flare box which is can be found in this post on the forums about generic feed flare.
How to find out who is stealing your feed
Now that you have added a unique copyright notice that will appear at the end of each post you can find out who is republishing your feed. You will need to wait a week or so until your feed has had time to be aggregated by other sites. Now all you need to do is search for the copyright text you used on search engines to find out where your feed has been indexed.
Make your feed work for you
In addition to adding a copyright notice you can also adding link backs to your site within each post. Referencing old content is useful for both you and the reader. Once you have written a post look back at some old content to see if there is any relevant content you can link back to. Now if someone republishes your feed at least you may get some visitors back to your site.
PS. Don’t forget the FeedGhost contest is still open.
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FeedGhost is a new Windows desktop RSS reader. It has a distinct web2.0 look and is highly customizable with lots of features not found in many web based RSS news readers. To be able to run FeedGhost you need to have Windows XP or Vista and the .NET Framework 2.0 (which is free).
As a newsreader you are able to view feeds in a Google Reader river of news style view or a more familiar outlook style if you’re a Windows user. There is a synchronization feature which means you can synchronize your feeds across multiple installations of FeedGhost, for example a copy on your home computer and one at work.
You are able to tag articles to make them easier to search for or to share with others. You can also email articles directly from the reader. Another useful function is the ability to create a link blog, this is basically to allow you to share articles you find in your subscribed feeds that you have tagged with others.
There is a limited free version where you are limited to 20 feeds. The Pro version is on a subscription basis for a very reasonable 20 US dollars a year.
Win a years subscription of FeedGhost
I have 3 subscriptions to give away so I have a little contest. To win all you have to do is send an email and let me know what you would like to see covered at RSS Newsniche. Send your email to newsniche at gmail dot com.
This post is from the Newsniche website and should not be reproduced elsewhere. Why not subscribe to the RSS feed and get this information delivered straight to your News reader.
It seems that secret RSS messages are all the rage these days. Publishing messages that only appear in your RSS feed can encourage casual web visitors to subscribe to your feed.
John Chow over at JohnChow.com is also running a contest. Knowing John I am sure this is one of his evil genius plans. By running the contest for RSS subscribers only he is encouraging you to become an RSS subscriber.
How does an RSS contest get you more subscribers
You have probably already seen the flaw in this plan. How can you get non RSS subscribers to subscribe with a contest that can only be seen by RSS subscribers? A long question but with a thankfully short answer - Linkbait. That’s right once bloggers find out about this they will, like me, blog about it. People will tell their friends about it and therefore get some more loyal RSS subscribers.
At least I hope that was John’s plan otherwise Iv’e just ruined another secret RSS competition.
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Your RSS feed needn’t be just a clone of your blog posts. You can add extra content in your RSS feeds that will only be visible to your loyal RSS readers and not your site visitors.
Hidden RSS content
The prevalence of RSS advertising is growing as more and more site visitors turn to RSS to get their next fix of your content. But additional RSS content does not just have to be limited to advertising. I mentioned the other day the growing use of RSS copyright messages.
John Robinson over at Sitefever has been using hidden RSS content to reward his loyal RSS subscribers. He is offering an exclusive RSS contest for them to enter. This is a good way of saying thank you to your loyal readers.
You can also use these secret RSS messages to encourage your site visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed. Marketing pilgrim used as similar technique which seems to have boosted their subscriber base to nearly 7,000.
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