Transfer FeedBurner Accounts to Google Accounts, More Info

Google Adsense for Feeds blog has published following information as of February 28th 2009, people will have problems managing accessing Feedburner accounts, if care is not taken. Simply create a google account and information is availale after the jump.

• The FeedBurner functionality of analyzing, optimizing, publicizing, and monetizing your feeds is not being shut down or reduced in any way. We have made some strategic decisions to remove some of our functionality that is not directly relevant to managing feeds for reasons we hope will become apparent over time. Names may change, things may move around, but in general our plan is to provide a lot more functionality that makes sense in 2009, and beyond, for all publishers. Learn more here.



• On February 28th, if you have not moved your feeds to a Google Account, the traffic to your feeds will not be cut off or terminated, but you will not be able to view or manage your feeds until you have moved to a Google Account, unless you use MyBrand. Technically, this means that all traffic will now be served out of our Google data centers, and there will still be a way to move your account that will be in place indefinitely.



• If you used MyBrand at www.feedburner.com, you absolutely must move to a Google account and update your DNS CNAME records by March 16, 2009, or else your MyBrand URLs will return a 404 error. If you use MyBrand and have not moved, you should have already received an email from us with detailed instructions. If, for some reason, you have changed the email address associated with your FeedBurner account, you will receive another message once you have finished the move process to the email address associated with your Google Account.

Transferring FeedBurner Accounts to Google Accounts FAQ

Tags: Google Adsense for Feeds, FeedBurner, FeedBurner Accounts

Feedly, As Explained By Robert Scoble

Feedly brings together Google Reader, friendfeed, twitter, and anything else to bring you a better and bigger News source. Robert Scoble spoke with Feedly CEO Edwin Khodabakchian and prests us how the newest incarnation of the application works. Get Feedly here.

Tags: Feedly, feed aggregation, Google Reader, friendfeed, twitter

Your Quotes, For The Last Five Years, On Google News!

If you thought the feeds that we get too much and there should be a better way to check out the news, I am with you. I have three separate news feeds that, I use to manage daily doze of various news. Still they fill up fast, 1000-2000 articles each. But until I have a better way to parse these, I have to deal with it.
Main while Google News team, has done something marvelous with the "Quotes" system. I have used the thirty day span of quotes by various people many a time. But now I am able to do that for a span of five years!
Just imagine indulging yourself in analyzing quotes by various people over last five years. I can forget about parsing my news as I will be spending a quite a bit time, with these quotes!
Just check out the quotes by Presidential Candidates, Obama and McCain.
But if you not into politics, there are many other people who uttered good and bad stuff, that might interest you.
To access these new features, first search for a person's name on Google News. If Google News has a recent quote, it will be shown above the search results, and if there are more quotes, you can expand on it!, which is again sortable depending on date or relevance. Go get quoted!
But the custom edition was much more enjoyable.
Google News Blog: Words matter

Tags: News Feed, Google, quotes, Obama, McCain

Google Toolbar 5 Ready If You Got Firefox

Sneaking behind Google Toolbar for Firefox users, Google updated the Google Toolbar for IE with new features a few months back. (What? how could that be?) Yes a few others also thought so and promptly emailed the toolbar team asking when those new feature will be available to Firefox users.
The answer and the new toolbar is ready. You can download the Google Toobar 5 in 29 languages and it is the the first Toolbar launched out of our St. Petersburg, Russia office. So head over to Google toolbar for Firefox site get yours.
The Autofill stands out as you can keep your profiles ready to be filled on your computer and those pesky sign up forms could be filled with just a one click.
Of course what is the toolbar without Google gadgets? you can add any gadget from the Google Gadget Gallery.
So lastly here is a video, that shows the virtues of Google toolbar 5 for Firefox.




Official Google Blog: Google Toolbar 5 now available in Firefox

Tags: Google Toolbar 5, Firefox, Google Gadgets

Google Reader Brings Friends Everywhere, And Gets Friendlier.

Google Reader Blog posted about some improvements to the Google reader. First of all it the sharing feature that was only available to US friends, now expands to the rest of the world. The other feature is that there is a new way to sort your feeds, if you do not like to drag and drop to arrange them, alphabetically.

Official Google Reader Blog: Friends Everywhere, and other Friendly Features

Tags: Google Reader, feed aggregator, RSS Technology, feedotopia

Sergey Brin goes blogging.

Sergey Brin goes blogging. With the first post about Parkinson's disease, shows that it is truly a personal blog. He also tells us what Google got to do with Googol.

Tags: Sergey Brin, blogging, Google feed, Googol

BOTW To Buy DMOZ! (End Of Free Reviews?)

According to a post on Shoemoney, BOTW, Best Of The Web is on it's way to acquire DMOZ. DMOZ had so far maintained a premier position on the web directories due to several reasons. The strict control of listing, and the association of companies like Google that relied on the directory maintained by AOL to create it's own Google Directory.
According to the article, BOTW has already hired those top editors away from the DMOZ and by any means doing much better than DMOZ already.
In the age of Google looking down on web directories, (Page rank drops etc) DMOZ (and BOTW) maintain a heafty ranks. But there is a big difference between DMOZ and BOTW. DMOZ is free and wether your site get included might boil down to a boil in the pants of those volonteer editors. I have managed to get some of my sites included but sometimes I wonder if it is worth it.
BOTW on the other hand charges a $249.99 review fee which is a prerequisite. BOTW also makes the point that their review for inclusion is not a guarantee of inclusion in their directory.
But I doubt that many people get excluded but I have not tried nor do I know the inner working of BOTW. But Google thinks they are good enough to give them a high PageRank.

I have no idea nor the Shoemoney, how the drama may unfold. But it might turn pages, web pages pretty soon. May be it is time we down loaded a copy of the directory. A few years ago we started parsing the directory for one of our search engines but I have not visited the DMOZ recently. Hope BOTW do good to DMOZ.

Tags: DMOZ, BOTW, WEB DIRECTORY, google, shoemaoney

Google Gadgets For Your Blogger Blogs!

Fresh out of Blogger's own testing ground, Google Gadgets have now been enabled for all layouts blogs. This new interface allows for the integration of iGoogle Gadgets directly into your sidebar, with an array of customization options for easy tweaking. Also built into Gadgets is our robust Gadget Directory, which lets you browse through thousands of cool gadgets and add them to your blog with a simple click of a button.
Blogger Buzz: Spice Up Your Blog with Google Gadgets!

Tags: Gadget Directory, Blogger, Blogspot, Google Gadgets

Happy 4th Of July America!

Happy 4th Of July America!

Tags: 4th of July, America People We See, Independence day

Super Charged Blog List, RSS Powered

This example at work on the sidebar on the left side, scroll down to see.

Blogger has released a new page element for Layouts blogs: Blog List. If you were using Link List before to create a list of your own or friends blogs, Blog List is the link list with a woomph!. Instead of the static links, now you can have dynamic list that uses blogs’ RSS and Atom feeds to show update times, post titles, and snippets.

Here’s a quick summary, that I took from Blogger Buzz, of the features that a Blog List gives you:

• Link to blogs, web pages, and feeds from your blog’s sidebar, with an optional favicon
  
• For pages with RSS and Atom feeds, Blog List can show last updated time, post title, and a snippet of the latest post
  
• Sort links alphabetically or by last update time
• Show all links, or hide some behind a “show all” link
  
• Import subscriptions from Google Reader
  
• Blog List links are visible to search engine crawlers, so your blog’s PageRank and reputation flow to those you link to

Read more here and watch a video.

Blogger Buzz: Show off your favorite blogs with a Blog List

Tags: RSS feeds, Atom Feeds, Blog list, Link list

Tags: RSS feeds, Atom Feeds, Blog list, Link list

Bloglines VS Google Reader, Show Me The TOPDOG

I came across a post by Heather Hopkins of Hitwise about how Blogline doing it's deeds against Google Reader. I use both bloglines and Google Reader and so does my collegues. So who is the top dog? Who does the best fetching? (TOPDOG is the best hotdog around where I live and where we get our midnight snacks, usually two dogs! Calabrese and Hot Link, eaten on the street, leaning against the car! So this dog fetches me, time to time)

According the analysis done by the lady and her firm Hitwise, Bloglines is still running in the front but Google Reader is steadily closing in.

I am more of a numbers guy than a word guy, so I am going to grab some graphs and let you go and digest the words of Heather later. The graph above is how they stood in August of last year and the one below is how they are doing now. Both are heavy climbers and Google Reader seem to be doing some catch up. There are other players as well but these two dominate the scene now. (until Feedotopia shakes the ground!)

But the gem of the analysis was the graph below!. These are the downstream visits to publishers from both Bloglines and Google reader. This makes me want to have Google Reader be my traffic cop. Because except shopping, Photography and personal blogs, Google Reader seem to be doing wonders. I think Photo attributes to the new Flickr feed module in Bloglines Beta. I use the feature a lot and I like it. Further more if you are a Shopping or Retail site, it is better to have Bloglines behind you!.Following is Heather's view of it;

• The top downstream category for both feed readers was News and Media. However, Google Reader sent 61% more visits to News and Media websites than Bloglines.
• Bloglines sent almost as much traffic to Blogs and Personal Websites as to News and Media (9.98% and 9.95% respectively). By contrast, Google Reader sent more than twice as much traffic to News and Media websites. This indicates that Google Reader users are more inclined toward mainstream media - using the reader as a front page of a newspaper - while Bloglines seems to be used more for following blogs.
• Bloglines users are also more inclined toward Photography websites, while Google Reader users are more inclined to visit Television websites.
• And the last difference I'll highlight is that Bloglines users are 24% more likely to continue on to a retail (Shopping & Classifieds) website.

You can see more data and Heathers analysis at her Blog, here is the post.
Bloglines Beta.
Google Reader
TOPDOG

Tags: Flickr feed, Heather Hopkins, Hitwise, Blogline, Google Reader, feed aggregator, RSS Technology, TOPDOG, feedotopia

RNews 0.91 With a bunch of new features, bug fixes, and performance improvements.

Rnews has released a new version, 0.91, at the beginning of this month. I have tested RNews in many test settings but yet to deploy in a production environment. Perhaps this new release will convince me to do so. I have just downloaded and soon will replace one of my test setups of old version.

This release has a raft of new features, bug fixes, and performance improvements. It's definitely the best Rnews, yet. Thanks to everyone who contributed ideas and bug reports!

• Feeds are scored using personalized statistics, one- and two-column block views are more flexible, keyword search is supported, heuristics try to fix broken feeds, and feeds may be added using bookmarklets or a Firefox extension.
• New user options were added for keeping stats, expanding articles in single-feed view, and opening links in a new window.
• Rnews received a styling upgrade, with rollover icons and more AJAX interaction.
• IP-locked cookies are now optional (though recommended).
• Many bug fixes, in caching, IE presentation, redirects, and elsewhere.

Database structure has changed, but there is now an automatic upgrade process (from 0.8x only). See the instructions on the download page.

Update: minor bug in 0.90 is fixed in 0.91, which is drop-in compatible.

Tags: RSS Aggregator, RNews 0.91, feed Aggregator

Shorten your Net Time With RSS Subscriptions.

I always use my Google reader to go through my favorite blogs. I also have a bloglines account setup for blogs that I read infrequently, like once or twice a week. You take it for granted, just like email, I read it a few times a day. But you assume everyone knows about it. But today I read an article by The Net Fool, (A young guy but by reading his posts you never guess. You have to visit his about page and I think you will say great!)
But the reason for this writing is that the net fool is out to tell teach others about making money online and his lesson on RSS, simple but very informative. He explains virtues of RSS feeds as we do here but never wrote actually how to use it. So without my rumblings, here is the article;Five Reasons Why Subscribing to RSS Feeds Is Worth Your While.

Tags: RSS feeds, RSS Reader, RSS Subscriptions

VisualRank, A Pagerank For Your Logos, Photos Or Any Image On The Internet!

Google has unveiled a new tools and plans to rank images on the internet better. Today most image search engines rank images based on text description of the image. But this might not bring out the best image! The researchers have sighted two searches on Google image search for "Eiffel Tower" and "McDonalds", as examples. The Eiffel images were relevant but McDonalds were not exactly what you want if you were looking for "McDonalds"
Image search has always fascinated me, from large database pattern matching, (You draw a doodle of the image you are searching for with your mouse on a slate) to face recognizing for security purposes. Both the subjects are bordering each other as well as my latest fascination with medical imaging with pattern matching. But the Google researchers may look at it from another angle.
So how does this work?
The algorithm, (which is also presented in very technical and theoretical paper, which is very interesting if your field is image processing.) is to collect a bunch of images based on the search and then analyze the results to select best possible image among them.
I will be reading both the papers that were presented by Official Google Blog article, Visualrank,
Pagerank for product image search and YouTube datamining (which I have read before).
The see the Google blog, click on the link below.

Official Google Research Blog: VisualRank

Tags: Visual Rank, Pagerank, pattern matching, medical imaging, Visualrank, image search

Feedburner Advances and AdSense in Your Feeds!

Within next few weeks selected publishers at www.feedburner.com, will have the opportunity to sign in using their Google Account. Feedburner became apart of the Google a while ago.

If you are among the selected few and decide to migrate the accounts, all of your settings, feeds will be managed through your new or existing Google account. Basically this is a single sign on that I have with Google, I sign in once and all my services like blogger, Google Docs, Google Analytics, AdSense are auto signed in. So if I am one I will be able to do the same with Feedburner as well!.

Thalking about AdSense, there will also be a tighter integration with AdSense. This should be good news for feed advertisers, and whom those plan to be. Google AdSense in your feeds! Wow.

There are few other changes as well, following is directly from the Feedburner blog;

As part of this Google Account migration, we will need to make a few process changes for our API partners. Effective immediately, the FeedBurner Management API will only be available for existing FeedBurner partners and those Google partners who currently have access to other Google AdSense APIs. The Awareness API will continue to work exactly as it did before, noting that once you migrate to a Google account, you will have to use your Google account credentials IF you use the authenticated API.

If, going forward, you do not want to sign in with a Google account, you can always take your feeds with you by redirecting your subscribers back to your source. Migration will ultimately be here for everybody, including all you MyBrand folks who are master of your domain.

tag: feedburner, Advertising, Adsense in Feeds, Feedburner account migration,

AideRSS To Help You Filter Your Daily Doze Of RSS Feeds!

I came across AideRSS while ago but did not have time pen something about it. But now it is a must as it is everywhere I manage read my feeds. So instead of writing I have borrowed from other peoples writing! ;).

But I have a question, What if you are a publisher? your pagerank goes higher if people read your posts and propagate them and you get you postrank high. But people don't read your articles because of your post rank is low! Oxymoron RSS!

But no worry you can fix it, just get two of your friends to dig your article and the postrank will jump!

"Users of the NewsGator Online Reader are going to find a new, nifty feature in their readers today: AideRSS PostRank filtering! Similar to the AideRSS GoogleReader Extension for GoogleReader, this functionality will enable NewsGator users to easily sort posts based on social engagement, and quickly find and read what matters."

If you do not know what AideRSS is;

There are only 24 hours in a day and a near infinite number of blogs to follow. You don’t attempt to read the entire newswire every day, and we didn’t think you should be doing the same for every blog. We set out to create an aide, like the newspaper editor, to help you find and read what matters.

AideRSS is an intelligent assistant, which continuously monitors RSS feeds, finds the good stuff, creates a PostRank™, and delivers it to you. We do the grunt work of collecting information on every post, allowing you to focus on your agenda and stay on top of the news stream.

tag: Feed Technology, AideRSS, GoogleReader, NewsGator, PostRank,

New Alexa Ranking Is Live!

Alexa has changed it's ranking algorithm and a new and less Alexa toolbar dependent method is up and running. This would change the Alexa Ranking for some. Now the ranking data come from multiple sources that will enhance the ranking. But they are not telling us what those sources are! Perhaps to deter those who misuse the ranking or may be something that they forgot to announce.
Here are some Q&A from Alexa;
My site's ranking has changed. Was it wrong before?

Your ranking wasn't wrong before, but it was different. Alexa toolbar users' interests and surfing habits could differ from those of the general population in a number of ways, and we described some of those possible differences on our website. While the vast majority of sites' rankings were unaffected by such differences, we've worked hard on our new ranking system to adjust for situations in which they could matter.

The new rankings should better reflect the interests and surfing habits of the broader population of Web users.

Why are the long range graphs gone? I can only get 9 months of historical data.

We are recalculating historic traffic data and will continue to add it over the coming weeks. We apologize for the inconvenience, but should have several years of data back on line shortly.

Will you change the rankings again?

We are constantly working to ensure that we provide the most useful data that we can. We will continue to fine tune our algorithms but don't foresee any additional big changes. If you think something is amiss please let us know.

I liked the old rankings better. Are they still available somewhere?

We liked the old rankings as well. However, we developed the new system in response to the huge number of requests we got from users like you, and now that it's done we like it even better. We hope you will too.
We think that having more than one ranking system at a time would be confusing, so we have removed the old rankings.

Do you want to know what I think about this?

Definitely. We've been collecting suggestions and ideas for months now, and would love to hear more. If you have thoughts on what we've done so far, or ideas on what we should do next, please share them with us.

You can give your Feedback to Alexa here
tag: Alexa, Alexa Toolbar, Alexa Rank,

Bloglines Beta Brings A Slew Of New Features, Search, Flickr View and Improved Add Page

Bloglines have made a bunch of nice changes to Bloglines beta. I have already signed up and enjoying it. Below are some facts from bloglines News. But there are more like Bloglines Top 1000, which I liked very much. The movers and shakers are visible together with moves and shakes (graphs).
I really dig the bloglines beta.
Blog search is finally in Beta, and we've incorporated some popular Ask 3D features. For example, related searches are displayed in the right-hand column next to results. All of classic's features are still there, but with newer styling.

Flickr View Selecting a Flickr feed and viewing it in quick view now uses the Flickr API to show images at their maximum resolution.
Add Page Beta's old add page was spartan, to say the least. The new Add page has package tracking, weather feeds, and a new feature: Packs. You can now add popular categories of feeds with a single mouse click.
You can sign up here!
tag: feed aggregator, bloglines beta

Self-Service Feed Transfer capability with Feedburner .

If you are a Feedburner user, you may have noticed the new feature that burning people have added to your My Feeds control panel, (see above picture, just above Monetize.), called Transfer Feed. According to Feedburner, this has been live for weeks.

What is it good for?

Nowadays more and more people build blogs, websites, portal pages. They also get wise and burn feeds to increase awareness of the pages and to promote the sites in this large ocean of publishing. As usual there will be changes in content ownership and control lead to the desire to move a FeedBurner feed from one account to another. This used to be a hassle to the owner of the feed and the Feedburner itself. Before this feature, if someone who wanted to transfer a feed to another account used to a submit a request to Feedburner, and then one of the burning people would verify the accounts and then complete the actual feed transfer. Reliable, but time-consuming and tedious for all parties involved.

So no more sweating over transfers, you can now transfer it to anyone you like simply by using the Transfer Feed… link. (Please note that only feed owners may initiate transfers from their own accounts to others. Additional how-to info about Feed Transfer is in our Help Center topic.)

feedburner blog

tag: feedburner, manage feed, Transfer Feed, burning people

RSS For Educators, A New Book On RSS Technology.

A powerful technology, but a simple concept, RSS (“Really Simple Syndication”) makes it possible to easily access frequently updated content on the Internet. RSS allows you to “subscribe” to content and have updates automatically delivered to your computer. Many Web 2.0 tools, including blogs, podcasts, and wikis, have been made even more useful with the advent of RSS technology.

Let expert John Hendron show you how to use a news aggregator to harness the power of RSS for a variety of purposes, including classroom projects, professional development, and keeping students and parents informed. Learn how to use free and inexpensive software such as Garage Band and Audacity to manipulate audio files and create podcasts. Explore the pros and cons of various blogging platforms. Have your students blog, and use RSS to deliver their assignments to you automatically. With RSS and the Read/Write Web, the possibilities are endless.

A glossary and an extensive list of online resources round out this essential guide to the power of Web syndication.

Features

* A complete introduction to RSS technology
* How to harness the power of RSS for educational purposes
* The pros and cons of low-cost and free Web 2.0 software

"RSS for Educators" is available online for $20.95 for ISTE members and $29.95 for nonmembers. More information about the book, including the table of contents and a free, downloadable excerpt, is available at http://www.iste.org/bookstore. The book is appropriate for grade PK-12
teachers, pre-service teachers, technology coordinators, curriculum developers and teacher educators.
tag: RSS Technology, RSS For Educators,