Crenk

Just two days ago, www.feedheads.org was brought to my attention. There are plenty of RSS Reader sites out there, but Feedheads offers a different experience by not reinventing the wheel, but rather attaching itself to an already popular social site, Facebook.

At first glance Feedheads is nothing fancy. It almost reminded me of a Craigslist-like site which little to know aesthetics and a focus on information. Personally I don’t care what a site looks like as long as it’s informative and easy to find what I need, the bells and whistles are just icing. So don’t turn away from Feedheads until you’ve given it a try.

To log into the service you need a Facebook account, and you must allow Facebook to provide access to the site, but once you’ve gotten through the set-up you’re logged right into full access for Feedheads.

I admit at first glance I saw no need to really delve into it since there was no social aspect, but attaching to Facebook makes it very different from other RSS sites. From within the site you can introduce your contacts to stories, have them vote on their favorites and even have them join your networks. You’re given the opportunity to view the stories by three categories, “New”, “Top in 24 Hrs.”, and “7 Days”. A separate link will provide you with the days most popular tags, which is useful for a quick at-a-glance of the days topics.

If you’re a heavy Facebook user and you’re looking for new ways to make that your one stop shop for friends, news, and other information, give Feedheads a try. If you’re stuck on looks then perhaps looking elsewhere would be prudent, Feedheads is definitely for the purist.

RSS advertising has long been an underutilised revenue stream. On Friday Google Launched feed advertising with Adsense, and there has been a lot of buzz around the internet.

• Makeuseof - Google Adsense for Feeds Finally Goes Live
• John Chow - Google Offers Adsense for RSS Feeds
• Webware - Google Quietly Launches Adsense for Feeds
• Daily Blog Tips - Google Adsense for Feeds is Live: Many Doubts Though

Although there might be some issues with migrating a feedburner feed account you are already using for your site, this is highlighted in the Daily Blog Tips link above.

Here at Crenk we have tried to not only sign up for Google Adsense, but also we have gone back to testing another RSS feed advertising provider, Pheedo. Im going to test both of these services at the same time and hope to report on the results. So stay tuned!

By: Luis Sandoval

RSS, seems like that is the new mainstream on how everyone gets their information. You can have RSS feeds go to your email, your blog, you mobile devices, and even use an aggregater to capture all your feeds. With sites like Reddit and Digg , one would have to question if there is more you can do with feeds…the answer is yes.

Now honestly at first glance RSSMeme does not stand out, as a matter of fact it looks boring and not as easy to understand. But the question becomes, did you come for information or did you come to see something pretty? We all know that answer. Like Reddit and Digg, RSSMeme offers a ton of news bits lined up in the order they were voted upon and posted. You get everything you need without all the extra frills, and you get functionality that I found to be very useful.

For starters you get the article, who it was posted by, from what site it was posted on, and the time it was posted. All standard fare, but below it is where you get the extra metrics you don’t get from other sites. You get a list of everyone who is sharing it, what other communities have tagged along with how many times. Definitely worthwhile if you want to know whether a post is worth reading or not, and just how popular it is on the internet.

The selections above for “now” posts, “daily” posts, “this week” posts, and “all time” posts is a very nice addition to break up the articles into sizable chunks that are digestible for the reader. Your ability to customize and personalize the feeds is the best feature for this site. I can pick and choose which feeds make it through to the site, kinda like filtering your email, making sure only the most important and interesting rise to the top. The ability to have your feeds and your community’s feeds added to your Friendfeed is another awesome addition.

RSSMeme seems much more versatile then either Reddit and Digg. Though they may have “prettier” interfaces, and their communities are larger, I say give RSSMeme a try and play around with the customization, it seems like it has a lot to offer for those that stick around and explore!

ReadBurner is a unique service that shows and analyses what stories people are sharing. The stories currently seem to really be focused on Technology, but the service seems be growing and now integrates nicely with Google Reader, Netvibes and Newsgator. Thus, im guessing the service will increase to include more services, but then also move into different categories.

Readburner is getting used more and more because news consumption is still increading and RSS readers and start pages have made it easier to consume even more information. Readburner aggregated the most frequently shared content from these services to provide an overall feel of what everyone is talking about.

Readburner is a unique way to view the most popular stories from around the net and im looking forward to seeing how it improves.

I was reading about an interesting product over at Webappers today, Feed Compare. Feed Compare is a free web application that can be used to compared feedburner feed counts from any website that has enable their feed counter. This tool is great, simple and easy to use. Users just have to find out the feedburner address of the feeds they want to compare and then insert them into this compete looking tool.

Features for this tool include: viewing up to 24 months worth of data (other options are: 12 months, 6 months, 3 months and one month). Zoom in on particular timeframes using click and drag. Users can link directly to the feed comparisons chart much like Alexa ‘permalink’ style. And it allows users compare up to 4 feeds at a time.

Back in 2005 5% of the Internet users said they were using RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is posted online.

Feedburner recently reported that they track around 60 million RSS subscribers. Even if we bump that number to 70 million RSS users (counting people that use RSS with other applications or platforms) this would still convert to a meager 5,4% of the Internet users around the world, as of today.

RSS is a tool that is so useful in my everyday life currently and please support RSS Awareness Day.

Last Thursday Bidvertiser launched 3 solutions that will help the majority of blogs make money inside their RSS feeds. Bidvertiser has listened closely to what bloggers say they need, thus coming up with the following:

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.

All of these great features are now live in their publisher panel. RSS feed advertising is an area of the market that is underutilised at present, and with this push by Bidvertiser im sure they will gain more market share immediately. Now if only we could find out who was reading our feeds, then we could charge even more money for RSS feed advertising.

Do you want to keep up to date with the latest posts on ProBlogger?

We have a number of ways that you can subscribe to this site and receive updates. The main one that our readers use is our RSS feed.

What is RSS?

RSS is a technology that is being used by millions of web users around the world to keep track of their favorite websites.

In the ‘old days’ of the web to keep track of updates on a website you had to ‘bookmark’ websites in your browser and manually return to them on a regular basis to see what had been added.

The problems with bookmarking

- You as the web surfer had to do all the work
- It can get complicated when you are trying to track many websites at once
- You miss information when you forget to check your bookmarks
- You end up seeing the same information over and over again on sites that don’t update very often

RSS Changes Everything

What if you could tell a website to let you know every time that they update? In a sense, this is what RSS does for you.

RSS flips things around a little and is a technology that provides you with a method of getting relevant and up to date information sent to you for you to read in your own time. It saves you time and helps you to get the information you want quickly after it was published.

RSS stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’. Many people describe it as a ‘news feed’ that you subscribe to.

I find the ’subscription’ description helpful. It’s like subscribing to a magazine that is delivered to you periodically but instead of it coming in your physical mail box each month when the magazine is published it is delivered to your ‘RSS Reader’ every time your favorite website updates.

How RSS actually technically works is probably a lesson for another day but the key today is for you to understand why it’s good and how to use it.

Let me say right up front that I’m not the most technically savvy guy going around - but even I can use RSS. At first I found it a little strange to make the change from bookmarking to RSS but I found that when I started that I just couldn’t stop.

How to Use RSS

Get an RSS Reader - The first thing you’ll want to do if you’re getting into reading sites via RSS is to hook yourself up with an RSS Feed Reader.

There are many feed readers going around with a variety of approaches and features - however a good place to start is with a couple of free and easy to use web based ones like Google Reader and Bloglines. Either one will do if you’re starting out (I use Google’s Reader) - as I say there are many others to choose from but to get started either of these are fairly easy to use and will help you work out the basics of RSS.

Both of these feed readers work a little like email. As you subscribe to feeds you’ll see that unread entries from the sites you’re tracking will be marked as bold. As you click on them you’ll see the latest update and can read it right there in the feed reader. You are given the option to click through to the actual site or move onto the next unread item - marking the last one as ‘read’.

The best way to learn how to use either Google Reader or Bloglines is to simply subscribe to some feeds and give it a go. Both have helpful help sections to get you up and running.

Note: other options to tracking websites that you might already be familiar with include using pages like MyYahoo, MyGoogle and MyMSN.

Find Some Feeds to Subscribe to - there are two places to look for a site’s feed:

1. On the Site
2. In Your Browser

On Site Subscription
Over the last few years you may have noticed a lot of little buttons and widgets appearing on your favorite sites and blogs. Little orange buttons, ‘counters’ with how many ‘readers a blog has, links called RSS, XML, ATOM and many more.

Browser Subscription

Many internet browsers now have the ability to find and subscribe to RSS feeds built right into them.

When you surf to a site you can usually tell if it has an RSS feed by looking in the right hand side of address bar where you type in the site’s URL.

Here’s how it looks for ProBlogger when you’re using Firefox:

See the little orange icon on the right hand side? Click that and you’ll be locating Crenk’s RSS feed.

To quickly and easily subscribe by clicking these icons you’ll want to set up your browser to do it with your feed reader of choice as by default they will probably subscribe you using the in-browser reader. You can do this by going to the ‘preferences’ to your browser and choosing ‘Google Reader’ or ‘Bloglines’ etc as your feed reader.

Once you’ve done this and have subscribed to a few feeds you’ll begin to see unread items in your Feed Reader and you can start reading.

Don’t want to Use an RSS Reader? Email is an Option

If the above explanation all just seems a little too complicated for you then please don’t worry. Many sites also enable you to subscribe to RSS feeds via a more familiar medium - Email.

Here at ProBlogger we know that not everyone is into the RSS thing so at the top of our right hand sidebar there is a field where you can enter your email address and get a daily email with a summary of our latest posts. You can unsubscribe at any time and your email will be kept private and not used for any other purposes than to send these daily updates.

JohnChow and Shoemoney are having a little competition between blogs for the month. Whoever can get the most new RSS subscribers for the month will receive a free link on their competitors site.

Current Standings are:

Who do you think will win??

John Chow also has a competition to try to make sure he wins the prize.

Hello everyone and Welcome to the new Crenk site. In the last few months we have had a lot of changes and this has culminated with a new blog design!

Crenk reviews Web Apps, Comments and Tech News and more. If you have a new startup, want to submit a press release or breaking news about your product, then make sure you contact us.

Since Crenk has reformed we now have partnerships with Newstex and BlogBurst. Additionally, we have added a new News Tool bar in the right hand column in which you are able to view some break Tech News from around the blogosphere.

In the coming weeks we will also make available Advertising on Crenk. Crenk will be offering 125 x 125 sponsors in the right hand column as well as Text Link Ads.

I hope you like Crenk and what we are trying to achieve and please subscribe to Crenk for all updates.

Crenk Team