The Ad Heavy Feed Footers

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It was bound to happen, ads hitting the RSS feeds. It’s not even anything even remotely new, popular services such as Feedburner (pre-Google) offered advertising solutions for your feed, and does now too, thanks to Adsense. Other players in the feed sphere did it too, and don’t forget the publishers themselves – adding something at the end of the RSS feed isn’t even all that hard. And I’m not even mentioning the fact that if you put an ad in your blog post, it’ll go right along in your feed.

It makes sense. A lot of us like to read, or at least glance, stories in the feed reader. We might not visit some sites in weeks, despite being regular readers.

Enters the ads in the RSS feeds. Problem is, where there is plenty of opportunity to make it look splendid and great on a website, the feed doesn’t have the same possibilities. Which makes it ugly. [Read more…]

YouSayToo nails shut the coffin for partial feeds

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I’ve not heard anyone arguing about the merits of full or partial RSS feeds for some time now (perhaps I’ve not been looking hard enough) but it seems that one blog community is making its feelings known – albeit a couple of years late.

YouSayToo.com, the network that aims to allow blog owners to make additional revenue by linking up, has sent an email to its members as follows:

We would like to inform you that YouSayToo.com no longer accepts blogs with short feeds. All blogs with short feeds have been hidden and they won’t show up on public pages like Top24h. If your blog has a short feed you can set it to full and contact us so we could make your blog public again.

[Read more…]

MyAlltop Launches: Get Your Own Alltop

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Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop, called “the online magazine rack”, is really just a collection of RSS feeds in various topics, displayed in Popurls fashion. Now you can get your own, because the one year anniversary brings MyAlltop. Get an account and pick any of the 31,000 sources from the 550 topics (numbers courtesy of Kawasaki) by browsing the Alltop site. Then arrange it anyway you like to get your own Alltop page.

Pretty nice actually, although I prefer the feed reader before this. Still, if you’re an Alltop fan this is a must.

Exploring Social Media: Start With the Basics

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Exploring Social Media article series badgeIn Exploring Social Media: Social Media Tools, I featured a list of what other social media sites and experts recommend as their social media tools. Let’s take a step backwards and explore the basics you need to have in place as part of your core social media tools for bloggers and businesses as part of this ongoing series on Exploring Social Media.

While the concept of social media and social media tools confuses many, the basic social tools are ones you probably already have and use. You might not think of these as social media tools, but they are crucial to today’s communication strategies.

You probably understand why you need these, but let’s review the reasons you should have these basics in place to start your blog, online persona, business, or media campaign. [Read more…]

Bloglines Tackles Feed Problem

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It appears that Bloglines have managed to solve the issue with feeds not updating accordingly. This from their news page:

Some folks might have noticed that specific feeds were not updating recently on Bloglines, and we wanted to update you and fill you in on what’s been going on. We have figured out what the glitch has been. Over the weekend, a fix was released on Bloglines to resolve the issue. All feeds should now be updating and back to normal

Now Mark Fletcher can stick to his old service and won’t have to move to Google Reader!