As news has spread very rapidly over the past day, Google News has added RSS feeds to their offering. And as has been observed, their RSS package has a good way of handling duplicate stories as related links. So here’s what I’ve been waiting for since I released the ScrappyGoo Google News RSS scraper. ScrappyGoo will still be maintained indefinitely because thousands of feeds have been generated from it so far and while I’m sure many of the users will start using the official feeds, a large percentage of the ScrappyGoo feeds will still continue to be used. The resources being used by ScrappyGoo is quite manageable.
UPDATE: Searchenginejournal makes the interesting point that Google will probably insert RSS ads into their Google News feeds. I’d forgotten about that. ScrappyGoo will always remain ad-free. So I’m definitely keeping it around and waiting for the surge in traffic when Google starts adding ads to theirs.
Nothing else to say about GooRSS. It does the job it advertises. And it will probably take over from Ben Hammersley’s Google to RSS script because it has an input interface instead of making you construct the link.
Two new wishlist sites have come about recently. TheThingsIWant.com and MetaWishlist.com. Unlike Amazon.com’s wishlist, these are not site specific and you can list items you find on any shopping website. Both of them work very similarly. You can share your wishlist publicly or privately both on the website and in RSS feeds. Both of them supply bookmarklets for easy updating of your list. TheThingsIWant.com supports user-added tags, but neither service has a recommendations engine like Amazon.com does. But I’ll bet they’re both looking into it.
Via the RSS Wiki
Here’s an undocumented feature of Feedburner’s summary burner. Basically the summary burner “strips hyperlinks, truncates content, adds teaser message to each feed item”. In an ironic twist (since Feedburner inserts Google Adsense ads into approved feeds), I found that the summary burner also removes Google Adsense ads.
Here’s the Feedburner summarised feed I made of the RSS Weblog from Weblogs Inc. Normally the original feed from the RSS Weblog has Google Ads inserted into every entry. Not with the Feedburner one. They’re gone. Then again so are the hyperlinks. If you dislike those ugly ads more than not getting the feed with links, this is the way to go.
UPDATE: Dick Costolo of Feedburner writes in the comments that one of the TOS policies of Feedburner is that you must burn only your own feed. I scanned over the TOS and I’m not sure but I didn’t see that. If it isn’t there, maybe they’ll clarify that now.
I was re-reading the transcript for the Google Adsense webinar again. One thing that struck me was that the conventional thinking from Adsense is that return visitors suffer from “ad-blindness”. When they’re so used to the layout of a blog, they don’t click on the ads. The ones who do click on ads are more likely to be first time visitors, driven from search engines or inbound links.
One of the main arguments for truncated RSS feeds is that excerpted feeds drive traffic to your blog, assuming the visitors will click on your ads. But these visitors, according to Google Adsense, won’t do that. In fact, they probably lower your adclick ratio when they drive up your adviews without clicking on the ads.
So if your main goal is to drive traffic to your blog for the purpose of monetizing your blog, truncating your feeds for your loyal readers isn’t going to help. It’s going to hinder. On the other hand, having full posts in your feeds might increase your likeability to your loyal readers.
I’ve decided I don’t need traffic as much as I need loyal readers. So from today onward, I’m going to stop the practice of truncating my feed. But I will offer a truncated feed on my site to give readers a choice depending on what suits their reading habits better — skimming excerpts or remote reading from their feed reader.
(Ironically, for the very reason of ad-blindness, Adsense in RSS feeds doesn’t make sense either. The layout of the content and ads in feed readers is so standardised that people will just find it easier to ignore the ads.)
I think the whole point behind converting a feed to a PDF file is to be able to print it out for reading in hard copy. But the PDF output generated by this free online tool looks so plain. I think the next step for RSS2PDF.com is to allow some customisation of the output — for example, changing of the font or the font size at the very least as well as choices of layouts.
RSS 2 PDF - Online RSS or Atom Newsfeed to PDF Generator
Mary Hodder of Napsterization.org has produced an analysis of five popular blog content search services (Bloglines, Feedster, Technorati, Blogpulse, Pubsub). She examines what each of them searches, how they search, what sort of links they count and how long they keep those links counted. It gives us some idea of why the results from each of the search engines differs so greatly from the others. For example, Bloglines keeps all data on inbound links from Day One whereas Technorati keeps link data as long as it is on the front page of a blog, so their link count is much lower but much fresher.
Hodder has put her research into a table on a PDF file for easy reference. I’m sure many people will be using her table to produce more insights into the way each of these search engines work. I hope she’ll include Icerocket.com in that table when it becomes more popular.
Feeddigest is finally released and it has all the features I’d been waiting for. It’s like RSSmix and Bloglines in one. You can combine feeds and there’s an interface where I can see and control all my mixes. There’s even a built-in online feed reader. When the statistics feature comes into play, Feedburner will have a competitor.
http://feeddigest.com/
London’s bombed again. For news of the latest London bombing, I still have the Crisis Feed from two weeks ago ready. It has all the latest news from news sources around the world and from bloggers via Technorati and Flickr.
Crisis Feed: London 07/07/05 - powered by FeedBurner
Simone Carletti of RSS World has done a very nice thing and is maintaining an Italian translated copy of the wiki article Things you can do with RSS. He’ll be keeping it up-to-date as new additions to the wiki are added. Thanks, Simone!
Le cose che si possono fare con l’RSS