Posts Tagged ‘RSS’

Feedburner and FriendFeed: FailBurner

09.06.25

FailburnerFeedburner is probably one of the most-used services available for bloggers. Its RSS analytics, promotion and advertising features have made it a staple of many peoples’ blogging toolkits.

FeedBurner was also a first mover in the market, enabling it to attract a large number of people before viable competitors appeared. Thanks to its purchase by Google, it has been able to take advantage of the powerful Google Analytics system to enhance its statistical reporting.

That’s fortunate, because the team at FeedBurner seems to be doing everything in its power to alienate its users.

Inconsistent Reporting

On one hand you have the random blips in FeedBurner stats, where they tell you that half of your subscribers have disappeared overnight. That alone would be a significant issue for a service providing analytics – for sites publishing those numbers (especially those using those numbers to sell advertising) consistency is critical.

This problem is just that, though – a problem. Frustrating and unacceptable, yes, but still a problem that gets fixed.

Contrast that with the latest silliness.

FriendFeed? Huh?

In the last week, FeedBurner users may have noticed a significant jump in their RSS subscriber numbers. For this site, my total subscribers increased by 25%. On another site of mine, they jumped by 1860%.

This wasn’t caused by a technical problem. The reason for this is that FeedBurner now counts a person’s FriendFeed subscribers in their blog RSS subscription count.

Personally, I completely agree with David Spinks’ take on this. The fact that I subscribe to someone’s FriendFeed doesn’t mean I subscribe to their blog. It means I subscribe to their FriendFeed.

To me, this completely undermines the relevance of FeedBurner’s subscriber numbers. I get essentially zero referrals from FriendFeed, but this site now apparently has another 600 subscribers.

Communications fail

There was no direct communication to users around this change. The only reason I found out was because I noticed the big jump and looked closely at the stats. Where’s the option to turn this off? Where’s the communication with FeedBurber users?

Frankly, this could be the last straw for me. I’ve used Feedburner for several years now, but given that Feedblitz is taking a run at FeedBurner, they finally have a competitor. I may give FeedBlitz a try.

What do you think about this change?

Posted in: Google, social media, tools

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Five Tools For Drinking From The Firehose

09.05.14

Over the last few weeks I’ve presented to a number of groups around ‘101′ social media topics – how to get started, practical pointers, and ethical issues in social media. 

People often express shock at the sheer volume of tools and information out there in social media. It can be overwhelming, for sure.

So how can you avoid drowning in information? What are some of the best ways to filter through the noise and find the signal?

Google Reader

RSS will save your sanity when you start to get involved in social media. Instead of having to check 10, 20 or 100 sites for changes all the time, RSS feeds let you pull all of the updates into one place.

I always look to Google Reader when recommending a particular RSS reader – it’s web-based so it’s cross-platform, it’s available remotely and it’s easy to use. Other options include Feed Demon and Bloglines.

PostRank

If your RSS reader is getting clogged with too many feeds, PostRank may be your saviour.

My “A-list” of blogs alone covers about 50 sites. It’s a rare day when I can get to all of them. PostRank (formerly known as AideRSS) helps to filter your feeds by the level of “engagement” on posts. If you’re busy, just ask for the best posts out of your subscriptions, and read a few. If you have more time on your hands, read a few more. If you use Google Reader, the process is made even easier through PostRank’s Firefox extension, which lets you apply that filtering directly in your reader.

Tweetdeck

Tweetdeck just keeps getting better and has become the automatic choice for many people due to its powerful sorting functionality. If you follow any significant number of people, the volume of conversation flowing through Twitter can be overwhelming. Tweetdeck helps you to manage this through grouping your followers and setting-up searches for the terms that are important to you.

MicroPlaza

MicroPlaza aggregates all of the links posted on Twitter by people you follow, and a list of all the people who posted those same links. You can subscribe to that list via RSS and pull it into your RSS reader, further reducing the effort required to consume all this information. If, like me, you use Twitter to populate your reading list, that can be a powerful tool.

Still, if you follow a lot of people you could drown under that list of links. Fortunately, MicroPlaza lets you create groups of people you trust, aggregate their links and subscribe to just those links. Voila – your own personal newsfeed.

Delicious

Want to avoid having to trawl through the noise to get to the interesting posts? Why not make use of other peoples’ recommendations?

Delicious lets you subscribe via RSS to the bookmarks of other people. Create a network of people who you trust and you can subscribe to that, too. Alternatively, search for key terms that are important to you and subscribe to those results. You instantly have a continuing feed of sites that other people have found sufficiently valuable to save.

These are five of the key tools I use to keep things manageable. What do you use?

Posted in: social media, tools

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Social Media Baby Steps Don’t Have To Be Difficult

09.04.17

Yesterday evening I gave a presentation on “Maximising Social Media for Business” to a diverse group of communicators with the Halton-Peel Communicators’ Association.

As I moved through the presentation, I saw signs that people might be getting a little overwhelmed by the volume of information and tools I was throwing at them. 

My message to them, and to anyone dipping their toe into the social media waters, is:

It doesn’t have to be difficult.

While I like to recommend a gradual process of listening, then engaging, then developing and publishing, the first of those steps can be accomplished in just a few minutes per day and in a few simple steps.

  1. Go to Google Reader (or any RSS reader) and sign up for an account (it’s free!)
  2. Go to Technorati or Google Blogsearch and plug in your name, your company’s name, your hobby or anything that interests you
  3. Subscribe to the results of that search in Google Reader (in Technorati the link is at the top-right of the results column; in Google Blog Search it’s on the left of the results)
  4. Spend a few minutes every day reading what people are saying on your topics. Learn who the key influencers are; where they are present; and what they are talking about
  5. Once you’re comfortable, begin to comment on influencers’ sites

There – in just a few minutes per day, you’ve taken your first steps into social media.

Make sense?

Posted in: 101, social media

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Practical 101s: Google Reader And Persistent Search

08.10.16

As a public relations professional, it is your responsibility to be aware of the coverage your projects are getting. This applies whether you work on the agency side, the corporate side or in government.

One of the easiest ways to keep track of this is through persistent searches.

What is persistent search?

Persistent search allows you to enter a search term once and receive real-time updates whenever there’s a new result for that term, saving you time and ensuring you’re always on the pulse of what’s going on.

You should have persistent searches set for each client for whom you work.

You can set up persistent searches, via Google Alerts, to email you new results, but for today I’m going to focus on using an RSS reader to aggregate your searches in one place.

Your toolkit

This post uses two free tools to accomplish its goal:

For a little more on Google Reader, check out this video from Common Craft:

Four steps to enlightenment

There are four steps to this process:

  1. Set up a free Google account
  2. Search for your terms
  3. Find the RSS feed for your search results and plug it into Google Reader
  4. Organize your results

Step 1: Set up a free Google account

(Note: If you have a different preferred RSS reader then (a) you probably already know everything in this post, and (b) you don’t need the Google account)

If you don’t already have one, it’s easy to sign-up for a Google account:

  1. Go to Google.com (or .ca in Canada)
  2. Click ‘Sign in’ at the top-right of the screen
  3. Click ‘Create an account now’ at the bottom-left of the screen
  4. Fill-in the form on the next screen
  5. Check the email address you provided for the form, and click the link provided in the confirmation email to finalize your account
  6. Once your overall Google account is activated, your Google Reader account is created automatically (along with a host of other free services)

Step 2: Search for your terms

You’re now ready to conduct your searches. We’ll use two different (though related) tools to make sure we capture both mainstream media articles and posts from the blogosphere.

  1. Go to Google News
  2. Enter your search term (if it’s more than one word, enter it in quotes). You’ll likely want to search for client names, but you may also want to consider spokesperson names, executives, brands, specific products, slogans and/or competitors
  3. In a different window or tab, go to Google Blog Search and repeat step 2

Step 3: Find the RSS feed and plug it into Google Reader

Now that you have your search results, you need to find the RSS feeds for them and drop them into Google Reader.

If you want more information on RSS feeds, check out my “What is RSS?” post from a while back.

In both Google News and Google Blog Search, you can find the RSS feed for your search results at the bottom of the left-hand column on the results page.

Google Blog Search - RSS feed position

  1. Click the “RSS” link at the bottom of the left-hand column
  2. Choose “Add to Google Reader” from the two options presented

Step 4: Organize your RSS feeds

You’re almost there (and it really hasn’t been that hard so far, right?)! The last step is to organize your feeds so they don’t get really confusing when you have a few.

If you only have one or two searches to set up, you’re probably ok leaving them unorganized in the short term. From a long-term perspective, though, or if you have more than a few, I strongly advise organizing them.

Fortunately, it’s really easy to organize your results. Google Reader does it by organizing your RSS feeds into ‘folders.’ Personally I have one folder set up for each client (rather than grouping all of my client searches together) – so I have a few searches

  1. Select the feed you want to organize, in the left-hand column of Google Reader
  2. Click the grey drop-down ‘Feed settings…’ box near the top-right of the screen
  3. If you’ve already created the folder into which you want to put the feed, select it from the “Change folders…” list
  4. If you haven’t already created the folder, select “New folder…” from the list and enter the new folder name into the box that appears
  5. If this is a new folder name, you’ll see it appear in Google Reader’s left-hand column

There are a couple of other ways you can (but don’t have to) go about this:

  • If the folder already exists, you can drag feeds into it in the left-hand column
  • You can organize multiple feeds at once by clicking ‘Manage subscriptions’ at the bottom of the left-hand column. There, you can select multiple feeds by checking the boxes at the left of each row, and select the folders for them to go in via the drop-down box at the top of the screen. Note: In this view, “folders” are referred to as “tags.”

Conclusion

That’s it! You now have easily-accessible, real-time search results for your clients. You can check them at any time by going to Google Reader, although I personally prefer to leave it open in my browser all day so I can easily check the latest results regularly.

As you get more comfortable with RSS and searches for your clients, especially if you’re doing work in the social media arena, you may want to branch out into other searches. For more information on how to do this, check out my earlier post on “How to set up a simple online monitoring system.”

Was this helpful for you? What other topics would you like to get a practical introduction to?

This is the first in what I expect to become an ongoing series of ‘practical 101′ posts on public relations and social media topics. For other, similar advice, check out the ‘practical 101′ series. If you’d like to suggest a topic for the series, let me know in the comments!

Posted in: 101, how to, pr, public relations, social media

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AideRSS Google Reader Extension – Filter Your Reading, Easily

08.07.20

aideRSS_logo AideRSS, the excellent free RSS filtering service, just made their service even more accessible with a new Google Reader Firefox extension. This is the first application to be based on AideRSS’ newly-released Postrank API.

The AideRSS Google Reader extension makes it easy to separate the wheat from the chaff in your RSS subscriptions by integrating AideRSS’ PostRank™ system within Google Reader.

AideRSS ranks posts based on measures of engagement including traffic, comments, trackbacks, saves to social bookmarking sites, and discussion on micro-blogging sites like Twitter. With the extension, you can filter your feeds, from within Google Reader, based on that ranking.

filter

I’ve used the extension for a few days now. I’ve found it very helpful when I don’t have much time and need to try to absorb the best of my subscriptions quickly- by setting the filter level to “Great” or “Best” you can pick off the best of the crop and leave the rest for when you have more time.

I really like this extension (and AideRSS in general) as a way to help filter my massive backlog of posts. However, there are a few issues:

  • It takes time for AideRSS’ measures to kick in – comments, trackbacks etc don’t come immediately. If you read all the latest posts in your feeds throughout the day, the extension is largely meaningless.
    • This isn’t just a problem with the extension – I also found this problem when using AideRSS as part of my simple blog monitoring solution a little while back. If you’re looking for time-sensitive results, it’s not for you. I don’t see a way around this – AideRSS just isn’t built for this kind of application.
  • The extension slows Google Reader down considerably as it re-calculates the ranking for each post whenever you switch between feeds.
  • This kind of filtering, while valuable, lowers the chance that you’ll stumble upon that ‘hidden nugget’ that other people haven’t found.
  • Apparently, my ‘Advertising and PR’ feeds, with way over 1000 unread posts at time of writing, doesn’t have any posts that are worthy of the “Best” category.

It my seem like I’m tearing into this extension, but I’m not. I like it. However, you should be aware of the limitations if you start to use the service so you can adjust your use appropriately.

A few recommendations for how to use the AideRSS extension effectively:

  • Don’t bother filtering the feeds you stay on top of throughout the day.
  • Use the filter when you just have a few minutes to spare and want to pick out the best of your backlog of feeds. However, leave your favourite feeds unfiltered.
  • If you want to apply more persistent and flexible filtering on your feeds (just subscribing to a site’s best posts, for example), use AideRSS’ full service through its website (Side note: I would love it if the extension remembered how I like to filter each feeds and apply that filter by default on those posts .Clarification: The extension does remember your settings for each post – see the comments below – I’d love for it to remember the settings for each feed and apply them when you roll-up to the aggregate view).

Have you used this extension? What did you think? If you use another service to filter your RSS feeds, what do you think of it?

For information on how to install and use the AideRSS Google Reader extension, check out this video:

Posted in: 301, tools

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How To Set Up A Simple Online Monitoring System

08.06.25

Whispered secretBefore your organization launches a blog, before you start playing with Facebook, before you even think about Twitter, you should be listening to what people are saying about you.

I did this recently for my last employer in preparation for a high-profile event and received a lot of questions afterwards about how I went about it. My answer: it’s not that hard.

In this post I’ll walk you through three simple steps to setting up a basic system to monitor your online world. Note: There are professional tools available to do all of this and more – Radian6 for example – which you may want to check out if you have the budget for it.

You’ll need six free tools (+1 more for a bonus) to mimic the setup I used:

There are three simple steps to setting-up your system (plus the bonus if you choose):

  1. Define your keywords
  2. Create your searches
  3. Plug the results into your RSS reader
  4. Bonus: Filter your searches through AideRSS

Step 1: Define your keywords

Before you even switch on your computer, think about the different words and phrases you want to track. These could be brands, executives, spokespeople, competitors, stakeholders, products, programs or whatever else you want to monitor.

Some of your terms may initially be a little broad; you may want to narrow them down by adding creating ‘boolean’ queries, for example:

  • Executive name AND company name
  • Competitor name OR competitor product name

Step 2: Create your searches

(Note: this step happens at the same time as step 3 – as you create each of your searches you’ll plug them into your RSS reader.)

I used five different search tools for my system:

  • Google News for mainstream news coverage
  • Google Blogsearch, Technorati and Blogpulse for blog searches
  • Summize for Twitter coverage (Tweetscan would also suffice)

Plug each of your keywords and phrases into each of these search engines.

A couple of pointers:

  • Google lets you use parentheses to structure your search, so you could do:
    (brand name OR product name OR executive name) AND company name
  • Use the advanced searches in Technorati and Blogpulse to give yourself more options

You don’t need to use all three blog search tools – I used all three to make sure nothing slipped through the cracks. If, however, you want to just use one tool, use Google Blogsearch as the ability to use parentheses in your searches can let you create one query for all your searches – much more manageable if you decide to use the bonus step later.

Step 3: Plug the results into your RSS reader

Each of the search engines I’ve mentioned here provides search results in RSS form. As you run the queries for each search term you came up with, click the “RSS” or “Subscribe” links on the results page and subscribe to the results in your RSS reader of choice.

Subscribe link in Technorati

 Subscribe link in Google Blogsearch
Note: Blogpulse can be a little flaky – you may need to try importing feeds from there a few times before it will work.

Bonus – Step 4: Filter your searches through AideRSS

AideRSS is a free online tool that helps you to filter through your RSS feeds and filter out “the noise,” leaving you able to focus on the important posts.

You may not need to use this if you don’t anticipate a lot of coverage. If, however, you expect to find a lot of online conversations about your organization, this may be worth exploring. It does take a little time to set up but it’s very easy to do so. What’s more, AideRSS’ technical support is superb – very responsive and helpful.

To run all of your searches through AideRSS, use your RSS reader to export an OPML file of your feeds

Google Reader - Export your subscriptions

Then go to AideRSS.com and create a free account. Go to the ‘Settings’ tab and import your OPML file. Once the site has imported all of your feeds (this may take some time) you can set the level of filtering you want for each of them.

The last step is then to subscribe to the RSS feed that AideRSS creates for you, et voila! You have an RSS feed of your coverage, filtered for you!

(You can then unsubscribe from your original searches if you like, or archive them for future reference)

Suggestions?

I used this approach to set up a quick and dirty monitoring service for a high-profile issue and provided an update & analysis every 90 minutes to executives. Still, this isn’t a comprehensive solution and it certainly doesn’t offer the functionality of a professional product. However, for those just starting out or those without the budget for a paid solution, it should suffice.

What do you think about this approach? What would you change here?

Posted in: 201, how to, social media, tools

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What Is RSS?

08.03.01

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) can be confusing if you know little about it. Other people blather on about “subscribing,” “feeds,” “readers” and the like, while you have no idea what they’re talking about.

If this describes you, you’re in the right place.

RSS image

You can find definitions for “RSS” everywhere. Feedburner has a page on it; What Is RSS? is all about it; Wikipedia has a detailed page about it. The list goes on and on.

They’re all way too complicated.

You probably want to know more than just what RSS is. You also want to know why you should care, right? You’re busy enough already – you need a reason to add yet another thing to your life.

RSS, in really simple language

Here’s a great analogy for RSS, from Ed Lee (edited slightly):

Your web content is like water in a lake. Lots of people want it and you want them to have it.

But, to get it, they need to visit the lake, fill their buckets and then go back to their homes to use it.

RSS enables your audience to create a stream from your lake (where the content is) to their home (where they need the content).

I also like an explanation that Chris Anderson uses (paraphrased) (hat tip – Mitch Joel):

We used to have to go out and find stuff – news, sites, etc… RSS lets the web come to you.

For a slightly longer (3 minute) explanation, here’s a brilliant video from the Common Craft Show on what RSS is and how to use it:

 

Does this make sense to you?

(photo credit: photopia)

Posted in: 101, how to, tools

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