Archive for: rss
It has been reported over at Techcrunch that the Feedburner CEO has decided to leave the ship and is now becoming the Twitter COO. This has really made me think about RSS and where it is heading and is Twitter the next big thing in terms of keeping track of your favourite resources?
Steve Gillmor stated:
“Rest In Peace, RSS,” he wrote, saying “It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter…All my RSS feeds are in Google Reader. I don’t go there any more. Since all my feeds are in Google Reader and I don’t go there, I don’t use RSS anymore.”
Everyday I head over to my Google Reader and see what all the major sites have been talking about and for me there is simply no other alternative to easily read over 200 sites in one place. I know I can follow a lot of major sites on Twitter, but it is very difficult to keep track of more than 200 follows, plus you have to be online and watching when they post or you just miss the news (bad thing about real-time).
There’s nothing new if I say that the exponential growth from Internet made the data available for all of us a little bit harder to handle; and of course you can feel this consequence directly with your feeds. FeedStitch tries to simplify that by giving you the chance to unify your common feeds into one.
Using this web app it’s very simple, you only need the feeds URL, add them, and create the category. After that, you can visualize the entries directly from one place and as viewing a blog. You don’t even have to register, you can use any of these accounts to login and create your FeedStitch: Gmail, Twitter, Yahoo!, Facebook, AOL and openID.
Using FeedsStitch:
Start adding your feseds.
Complete the category lists and create the feeds group (in this case, I’m creating “System Center”)
Viewing System Center feeds
You can also customize the name of the URL that represents the FeedStich feed group.
For me, I can never have enough time to review and read all my feeds, and this web app sounds like a good way to arrange and optimize your time.
There’s a lot to find when surfing the net late at night, and thanks to RSS Feeds, a lot of the internet can come to you with some nice key words.
For those of you that want to sharpen your skills in searching, perhaps get more power out of Gmail, or even maximize your RSS efforts in Google Readers, this interactive guide is right up your alley.
This guide is not necessarily supported by Google, but they are aware of it, and having used some of these amazing “hacks” to get out of my google applications, it works and you’ll be happy to have used it.
Read the GOOGLE GUIDE!
Over at Six Revisions they have released in partnership with Creative Nerds a new free RSS icon pack. There are eight RSS icons in the pack, and it includes the Photoshop file (PSD) in case you’d like to tweak the design.
Licensing details
The creative work featured here – entitled ” SlickRSS ” – is licensed under the Creative Commons license and can be used for personal and/or commercial purposes.
The Creative Commons license requires you to “attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor”. Our attribution specification: you don’t need to attribute the work to us (though you’re more then welcome to, and we will definitely appreciate it).
Download
The following file contains PNG files and a PSD file.
Have you ever spent a lot of time searching around the Internet to find the perfect social media button that can be added to your site? Well stop searching and head over to MySocialButtons. MySocialButtons does what it says on the can and offers free social networking icons and buttons to download. Buttons include TTwitter, Reddit, Digg, Facebook, Stumbleupon and come in various different colours, styles and sizes.
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It has been reported by the Silicon Alley Insider that Yahoo is closing their RSS Advertising solution.
Not much word on why — a Yahoo spokeswoman provided this statement to SAI:
Yahoo! is closing its Ads in RSS effective February 2, 2009. The beta program, which enabled publishers to place contextually relevant ads on their own site, was available to a targeted group of small online publishers. We have ended this beta program to focus on other more broadly used ad products for our publishing partners such as Sponsored Search and Content Match.
Silicon Alley isnt really sure why Yahoo is making this move. However, here at Crenk we know that this is just a smaller part of the big move coming from Yahoo. I have heard from inside the company that they are going to be closing a lot of departments within their contextual advertising network. Major changes will be coming with the next three months.
What is currently happening with Feedburner stats? Is Google somehow updating the service, because in the last few days I have seen a huge drop in Google Feedfetch numbers within Feedburner. I thought I would also spend sometime trolling around the web to see if other sites have been affected by this situation and what I have noticed is that all sites have been affected by this. I was hoping Feedburner might be able to let us know if they are updating this system and why there are such drastic changes.
Currently for Crenk we have been noticing that more and more people are following our feed on Twitter. It has got to a stage now where there are more people adding us on Twitter everyday than subscribing to our RSS feed. Is this saying something? Is Twitter becoming more of an RSS reader for people or are they just following our feed in Twitter because we are fairly active and give actual responses to direct questions?
There has been a lot of talk recently about companies still not adopting new media as much as they should and especially Twitter, but I really cant understand why! Twitter is an amazing network tool for all types of companies and it can actually provide big organisation with an easy way to directly communicate with users. Branding on Twitter is easy to control and even easier to see who has been discussing your brand.
From my point of view I couldn’t live without my RSS reader, simply because I have so many sources of information and I can easily and effectively control and read them. Twitter could never be my RSS reader, but is it some kind of substitute?
Yesterday I was having a great conversation with Marshall Kirkpatrick (Vice President of Content Development at RWW, not sure what that means) about how to get your blog noticed in the current environment. The discussion started with me posing the basic question “how can I get my blog noticed because we seem to be producing very good content but not getting the rewards”?
It was first mentioned that Problogger is the best source for this information on the web, however I have been reading his site for many years now and most of the content seems to be getting a little reproduced. Additionally, Problogger talks a lot about social media and how to use it to your advantage, but these days everyone has been reading those articles for year and most bloggers use StumbleUpon, Digg, Mixx, Buzz and other very proficiently. If most bloggers are using these tools to their advantage then you still have the same issues, how to stand out from the crowd?
I know that here in Europe a blog that has been on the rise lately is TheNextWeb, but I know these guys have been writing that blog for several years now and they also have one of the best technology conference on the mainland of Europe. Therefore if I want to improve my readership it is a little difficult to just start a conference, or is it worth adding some add-ons to the site such as job board, marketplace or others?
Content is also a major player in this issues, cause most good bloggers say that content is king. However, I think that content is king when you are either a small blog or a large blog, but definitely in the middle content isnt king and it is all about promotion and push.
This is main problem with web 2.0, noise! Currently, there is just simply so much noise in most niche’s, so why instead of writing individual sites and keeping a little revenue, maybe the plan should be to join forces with other blogs and create a larger blog and take a smaller slice of a much larger pie.
I propose this question to you, “how can I get my site to stand out from the rest, especially considering we produce amazing content that is much better than the majority of our competitors”?
Everyday I have about 30 people start following Crenk on Twitter, but today I had a very interesting company show up. Tweetreplies is a new startup which sends twitter replies to your email address. I know there has been a lot of talk about this specific type of Twitter startup in the last week or so, especially with Twply.com. Unlike Twply (which sold for $1200 a few days after launching), Tweetreplies doesn’t require your Twitter username and password to actually operate. There are a lot people out there that have been talking about giving out their Twitter passwords to third party sites, so this is a great way to have a tool and not give up your password.
I have also noticed today that Techcrunch has changed their theme again. It hasn’t really been too long since they last changed their theme, probably about a quarter off the top of my head. Last time the Techcrunch theme was changed they seems to have nothing in their sidebar except advertising (i know Crenk also has a little bit of advertising), however that being said this new theme really addresses the key issues of the older theme.
The site itself is a lot more compact in the header and key change is that the 728×90 advertisement is no longer above the site, but fitting in with the header itself. The key green is not really as predominant, but it makes it easy to distinguish between Techcrunch and the other network sites. In the old theme they just had excepts on the home page, but now they have an additional three slots in which they can feature certain articles. Navigation has really improved within this new theme and now it is a lot easier to find new content. As well as feature articles in the header on the home page they have also added eleven featured articles in the sidebar sitewide. If I didnt have an RSS reader or use it everyday, with the previous theme it would have been impossible to keep up with the new content, however with this new theme it provides me with a better idea on what is happening in the tech space.
This new theme is far from perfect but it is a huge improvement from all the previous themes they had on the site. I would really still like to see a lot more integration between the Techcrunch home page and the other network sites, but im sure that will come within the year.
