This is a guest entry by Jean-Baptiste Jung from Cats Who Blog.

Feedburner, the popular RSS tool, is used by many bloggers to serve feeds to their readers, but also in order to know how many people are currently subscribing to their blog using RSS. Despite the fact it can be easily hijacked, RSS subscriber count is one of the ways used to measure the popularity of a blog.

Back in 2008, Feedburner was bought by Google. It sounded interesting at first, but no significant improvements were made to the service, and shortly after Google took ownership, a major problem occurred, and millions of blogs saw their count dive from 5000 to 500.

Since last month, I have seen my subscriber count going up and down every day and show unrealistic numbers.
Look at the screenshort below:

On June 12, CatsWhoBlog had 1,730 RSS readers. Three days later, it had 1,110. And on June 21, according to Feedburner, only 437 were still reading my blog. read more

We realise that widgets are ten-a-penny these days, but nonetheless here’s some interesting news for those who blog about fashion or celebrity news: UK-based The Nod has launched its own widget that will allow publishers to syndicate its content on their own sites.

As you’d expect, all you have to do is paste some code into the blog or social network template, with individual celebrity widgets available on each fan page.

As with most widgets, there’s an advantage on both sides. Smaller publishers get fresh content every day, while The Nod gets links to its site and merchandise. read more

Duncan Riley talks about the recent refresh of his news site The Inquisitr and it is interesting to see how he views the site more and more as a traditional news outlet. Besides the obvious visual changes and enhancements, Riley talks about the syndication deals we’ve reported on previously.

I’ve only touched on this side briefly, but we started syndicating content a couple of months back. We started with Bang Celebrity content, and started playing with AHN. As of two weeks ago we expanded our AHN deal so we take on much more of their content now. We don’t post all of it, and we’re trying to work around content that might be interesting. At the same time though, the mere fact that we’re syndicating content makes us more traditional news site every day; both deals are like signing on with AP or Reuters to a degree, and I’d hope it’s the start of something better again for us.

Be sure to read his post on the fourth Inquisitr refresh, and check out the new look. It is a step in the right direction says the designer in me…

Duncan Riley has announced the addition of Paul Montgomery as the in-house sports writer on The Inquisitr. Montgomery is a journalist by trade, and with the addition the site now features a dedicated sports category.

Riley also announced a syndication deal with BANG Showbiz, which means that The Inquisitr can run up to ten stories from their celebrity content stock, as an addition to the regular celebrity coverage. Finally, Riley also announced a deal with GumGum for celebrity photography. It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out, especially the syndication deal.

As for traffic, Riley reports that pageviews are down in June, 2.7 million to 2.55. He calls it a comfortable level.

Well, why not I guess. Although I wouldn’t recommend the average blogger to jump at the opportunity to add a Google News box, displaying the latest news from a set category, or even various keywords. It might come in handy for niche blogs, product focused blogs, or completely different ones. read more

Giga Omni Media have closed a deal with NYTimes.com, which means that content from the GigaOM network will be available on NYTimes.com come early October. They are not alone in this, but rather a part in redesigning the Technology channel at NYTimes.com. Other heavyweights that inked a deal to have their content available through this are ReadWriteWeb and VentureBeat.

This is the third heavy weight syndication deal for GigaOM, with BusinessWeek and CNNMoney already in the bag. Meanwhile, VentureBeat’s content is available on IDG’s Industry Standard. As far as I know, this is the first syndication deal for ReadWriteWeb though, although I might have missed something. read more

Have you claimed your Twitter feed on Technorati profile yet? This may be the perfect time to do so because Technorati is now indexing Twitter. It heatens up the debate whether Twitter is a form of blogging or not. I previously wrote that Google Blog Search defines the the blogosphere by technology by including everything that publishes a site feed in their index. According to Google a blog is anything that publishes a site feed and syndicates. It comes as no surprise then that tweets are showing up in Google Alerts.

Technorati seems to allow anything that publishes a site feed to be claimed, including your Twitter account. So how do you claim your Twitter feed on Technorati? It is just as easy as claiming any other blog, just read Twitter everywhere it says “blogs” or “blog software” or follow these steps:

1. Go to the blogs tab in your account
2. Claim a blog/Twitter account by providing the blog URL, for example: http://www.twitter.com/blogherald and begin claim.
   You may encounter an error stating that the Technorati Monster has escaped again, ignore it and simply try again. Technorati’s infrastructure does not seem to be build for the amount of requests it receives.
3. Activate your claim by pasting the provided HTML code in your Twitter update field and press update.
4. Done!

By claiming your Twitter profile on Technorati your tweets will be indexed. Yes, all of them, including the ones that say “brb, need coffee.” This means that there is a need to separate the wheat from the chaff as a lot of “breaking news” in the blogosphere is moving to Twitter.

With a potentially massive amount of indexable tweets the question arises if Google and Technorati can handle the maturing blogosphere? This question has become even more relevant now that Technorati is indexing Twitter. Joery Bruijntjes wonders why is Technorati is indexing Twitter? because

As you all know, Technorati’s main function is to map what’s being talked about on the web. To do that accurately, you need to gather a lot of information. Aside from the main article, blogs contain a lot of useful metadata like tags, outbound links, categories and trackbacks.

This kind of data -especially trackbacks and outbound links- is great for tracking conversation across media. You can see this in action on their homepage. They use all this great metadata to try and track what’s being said about news stories in the blogosphere.

Conversations are all about links and the amount of metadata in Twitter is limited to only 140 characters, or is it? Andy Beard describes how Twitter “also has a blogroll of sorts” in the form of “links on the sidebar to the people you are following which are links Technorati can see.” The blogosphere thrives on links but Beard describes how Technorati may not be able to cope with this new situation if “Twitter user like Robert Scoble with 100s, actually over 1000 followers” start claiming their feed and Joery Bruijntjes also points to Technorati’s vulnerability:

Last year news spread that Technorati “temporarily” dropped all content older than six month. To me this says they can’t cope with the enormous amount of data being generated by bloggers. Twitter has far less content to process, but still needs a dozen servers to keep things running.

Knowing that, why would Technorati take on all this extra burden? Surely it can’t be a content-driven desire, as the updates on Twitter contains too little metadata to be of help for linking news stories to the blogosphere. I could understand if they chose to build a separate search engine specifically for Twitter, or simply gave it a unique representation on their site. But they didn’t.

So why would Technorati index Twitter? Andy Beard provides at least one good reason:

Robert’s Twitter feed is legitimate content on a different platform, and that people are choosing to link to him from their “Twitter Rolls”

Are you providing interesting, informative or legitimate on Twitter? Have you claimed your profile yet?

Chris Garrett wrote in ‘Why Blogging is Not About Technology‘ that instead of focusing on technology we should focus on people. Kevin added in the comments that blogging is about sharing information and Lorelle VanFossen added that blogging is about (reader) interaction. An important blogging technology that enables us to share our information is the site feed. While the practice of blogging is not about technology the blogosphere heavily depends on this technology.

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So over the Christmas holidays, my uncle and I were sitting around in the basement, with my cousin, Mark, and he wanted to know if either of us knew of any software that would help the military organize their information in a better way. We talked about Basecamp, and a few other pieces of software, but of course we knew that the military would only accept software from a big box company like Microsoft or IBM, despite the amazing advances that other companies have made in the software space.

As we were going over the features that Basecamp had, I pointed out that it supported RSS, which for me was kind of cool, though I didn’t know how it could really be useful for collaborative software like Basecamp, I still thought it was worth mentioning. My uncle looked at me and raised an eyebrow. He didn’t know what RSS was.

My uncle is not a slouch academically, or even technologically. He helps pick out some of the equipment that the military will be using next, and his computer set up at home is fairly high tech, but RSS was foreign to him.

I went on to explain that RSS is like being able to subscribe to a variety of sites, as though they were newspapers, and your RSS reader, is like the house they are all delivered to. All the content you want is pushed to you, rather than having to go to each site, find it and read it.

Despite showing him an example of how useful it could be, he didn’t seem to really understand how it could benefit someone like him. He didn’t see the inefficiency of going to a dozen different news sites to get the content he wanted. He was worried he would miss something by subscribing to RSS, or that he would be getting too much of the things he didn’t want.

He also didn’t see the business model behind RSS, asking me if only certain content was pushed through, or if the content was limited in any way. The idea seemed totally strange to him, and despite sitting with him for half an hour, showing him how useful it could be, the end result was the same as the start: he didn’t understand RSS.

As a blogger, I constantly try to push people towards my RSS feed, as I want to keep them informed each and every time I write a new article, but here is my uncle, a man in his 40′s, unable to wrap his brain around why I would want to do that.

Has RSS really gotten to the point where it is well known enough by the Internet users at large that we can, without an informational page, push people towards it? Or should we bloggers be explaining what RSS is, and what the reader will get so that we can continue to teach those that don’t know, what they are “subscribing” to?

My hope for 2008, is that RSS becomes more ubiquitous, and pervasive online, and that next time I mention it, I don’t see a raised eyebrow from someone that does hundreds of tasks online each and every day.

The folks behind PayPerPost recently tipped us on the Alpha release of RSS Brief, a new, innovative RSS feed reader that summarizes feed content not just by truncating, but by actually using technology that analyzes the language within the blog posts.

RSSBrief uses some very slick lexical analysis technology to produce a proper precis of blog posts and other RSS feed contents to let you instantly get the skinny on a post without having to spend a lot of time drilling down into the details. With RSSBrief you can automatically reduce hundreds of pages of blog feed contents to just a handful, letting you keep up to speed with the latest happenings in the blogosphere quicker than ever before.

Bear in mind, we’re talking a full precis of a post here, just like Mrs. Smith taught you how to do in Middle School English all those years ago. We know how annoying it is to be reading a post that some lame aggregating service decided to simply truncate.

I’ve tried it and so far it’s still not 100% perfect, particularly for blogs that don’t publish feeds in full (I’m not sure how RSS Brief will handle these). But then again it’s still in Alpha, so we should expect developments soon.