donloeb.com

typepad just integrated FeedBurner’s feedflare service so that publishers can add “flare” without needing to sign up for advanced templates and insert javascript in the right places…

now you can add your favorite little web services (or…“story tools”…email this, add to delicious, # of technorati links, creative commons license, etc.) by simply checking a box in typepad. of course, you need to go to FeedBurner.com to set up the flare (under the “optimize” tab).

ahh, adding sharing and community tools to feeds and websites has never been easier :)

here’s an example of flare in a feed - see the text links at the bottom of the post from readwriteweb -> “this item is from readwriteweb,” “email this,” “add to delicious,” etc…for a website example, see the bottom of this post on donloeb.com

to get the same experience on a website, you typically need to cut and paste a javascript into your template, etc…but, here’s how easy it is to enable in typepad:

and, as a bonus, if you’ve connected your typepad feed to feedburner, typepad will automatically ping feedburner, ensuring that your content is up-to-date. note: remember to allow typepad to “publicize your weblog” (i.,e say “yes”).

please see our revised help section - thanks johnz…

lastly, a special thanks to mr. sippey (sixapart)…

scott rosenberg comments on something martin nisenholtz said at the annenberg center conference (accdng to david weinberger).

“Our research says that a relatively small group of people want to aggregate RSS feeds.” (martin n - paraphrased)

well, “of course”….scott agrees saying,

“Imagine it’s, say, 1995, when a lot of us early adopters were already spending tons of time online but much of the world barely knew the Web existed or how it worked. And imagine you did research then that asked people, “Do you want to access Web pages with HTTP?”

when i was at yahoo!, we did research on rss and found that 4 percent of the US internet population said they use RSS, but a full 27 additional percent use my yahoo, my msn, google personalized page, or some other aggregator to track content they care about. RSS is just the underlying technology and know one should have to see or taste it. soooo, everyone in the industry should focus on the benefits instead.

on a somewhat related note, yahoo pushed the add to my yahoo! chicklet () hard and was quite successful - most people don’t know RSS, but they know yahoo!

feedburner also provides a solution that helps with user conversion. when people click on an rss button/link, etc., rather than getting naked xml (prompting most users to wonder what happened to their computer), they see a nice branded (publisher branding) page with instructions on how to quickly and easily add the content to their favorite reader. also, feedburner remembers each user’s reader preference so that the next time they happen upon a feedburner feed anywhere in the world, they immediately see their favorite reader. again, it’s all about conversion…btw, publishers should do more to elevate rss (to article pages) and call it something else -> something more consumer friendly. :)

rafat pointed to an article saying that the diet coke/mentos video is doing quite well on revver.

in fact, it’s made the creators of the video $15k (after the 50% split with revver). this is pretty impressive actually - not bad for a short that cost $300 to make.

revver is smart - they are doing what they can to showcase this…they need a few “winners” to convince the world that there is actually a business model. of course, these things will always be hit driven - i.e, only a few folks will make meaningful money. the rest will be content with some pocket change and some fame…

this is definitely a friday afternoon video -pretty amazing actually. and, what brilliant marketing

i didn’t realize that this was live, but here it is - user created my yahoo “packages”

this is essentially OPML, but with added my yahoo goodies. besides rss, publishers can add sports scores, portfolios, weather, etc. and customize the page layout. this enables publishers to create robust “expert” or “starter” packs for their users…

this is all about letting users become evangelists..it’s the net promoter model.

while others have done this, my yahoo is the most successful and easiest dashboard product. so, this should be quite successful. it even works for folks that want to help their moms and grandmas get setup on my yahoo :)

interesting that it’s only being promoted off of the Yahoo Publisher Network. and, the instructions are quite lacking in terms of how to promote the packages. i know how to do it, but will others?