August 30, 2006
Adoption is always slower than you think...
According to a recent report from emarketer reported in Dead 2.0, only 2% of US employees subscribe to RSS feeds. 88% do not even know what it means! Other stats show that only 13% have a good idea of what podcasting is. You can actually see the bell curve of adoption at work, with 12% of people still not knowing what spam is (via Business 2.0).
The RSS numbers also jibe with the numbers mentioned by Martin Nisenholtz from the New York Times in another Business 2.0 article (not online yet). RSS feeds at the NYT only generate 12.2 million pageviews out of a US total of 295 million.
[Tags: rss syndication ]
Posted by francois at 9:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
December 12, 2005
BlogBridge reader came out with some cool new features
BlogBridge (an open source project that I have been involved with) came out with some cool new features - the most important one for me being the "reading lists".
As you may have noticed, many sites have started putting out OPML reading lists that contain various RSS feeds. Take for example the Corante Marketing Hub (if you did not know this - I am a partner at Corante). As one of the subscribe options we put out an OPML reading list that enables readers to subscribe to all the RSS feeds that make up the hub. The only thing I have to do with Blogbridge to subscribe to those is to set up a guide with that reading list. Another nice feature is that I can instruct BlogBridge to automatically update the list if Corante changes it's reading list. So let's say that Corante adds another blogger to their marketing hub, I will automatically be subscribed to that one as well.
John Tropea over at Library Clips has a great review of the new feature set as well.
If you have not tried out BlogBridge, and you are an RSS junkie like me (now subscribing to over 500 feeds), you should try it out soon! I know I am involved and so probably biased - but it is an open source project and I don't make money saying this! I would have never been able to stay up with the amount of information that I subscribe to without it, and I probably would have never found some of the interesting pieces of content and fascinating bloggers that I found with it.
[Technorati Tags: blogbridge rss rss reader opml reading list]
Posted by francois at 9:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
August 18, 2005
BlogBridge ships version 2.0
Disclosure: as many of you know, I have been an unpaid adviser to the BlogBridge open source project for a long time, and I am good friends with Pito.
That being said, you may still think that I sound like a commercial when I talk about BlogBridge - but as a power-user, I really do love the app.
I have been playing with many of the new BlogBridge 2.0 features as part of their weekly build program, and I advised on designing some - so I am very familiar with how they work.
The smartfeed feature is one that I use all the time now. I use it to create smartfeeds based on the Technorati, Feedster, Pubsub, and Findory services. But I also started being a big user of the smartfeeds where the system culls your own feeds to create a new synthetic feed based on posts that contain keywords of interest.
When I am busy and I just want to quickly scan what's out there, I just check my "marketing" and "PR" feed, or perhaps my "advertising" or my "blogging" feed and in a few minutes I can scan everything related to those topics written in the now more than 300 feeds that I subscribe to - very powerful. As I am refining my keyword filters, those feeds are getting better and better - to the point where I may want to republish some of them and share them with others...but that is 3.0 stuff...coming soon!
...of course, that brings up the whole legal issue related to remixing. Robin - I thought about your suggestion on that, and I like it - just do it and let's change the system by braking the rules!
[Technorati Tags: rss reader blogbridge remix]
Posted by francois at 4:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
August 16, 2005
11% of blog readers read rss feeds
That's what Nielsen says (here - via Micro Persuasion). The interesting part is that 5% read it through a client and 6% through a web-based site - confirming the roughly 50/50 split that Jupiter reported earlier this year.
[Technorati Tags: rss readers blogs]
Posted by francois at 7:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
July 27, 2005
The difference between blog aggregation and RSS search tools
Mary Hodder over at Napsterization has a great post on how the different blog aggregation and RSS search tools work.
One big surprise for me was how Technorati only counts links that are on the front page - so if a post with a link to your post scrolls down to the archives, the link count disappears.
Dave Sifry from Technorati comments about the pros and cons of doing that in the comment section.
Considering that in-links are a measure of a blog's reputation, and not of how interesting a blog is at any particular point in time, I am not sure that only counting home page links works.
[Technorati Tags: rss reputation]
Posted by francois at 8:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
July 21, 2005
Interesting new RSS stats
Bill Flitter over at Pheedo released some interesting stats on RSS usage (here - via Dana Vanden Heuvel).
Here are a few highlights from their findings:
- Tuesday is the most active day for viewership, feed retrieval and click through - Saturday is the least active with click through rates 70% lower than on Tuesdays
- morning scanners "view" more stuff, but late nighters "click through" more
- CTR on ads vary from 7-11% depending on the time of the day - that is surprisingly high
[Technorati Tags: rss rss advertising stats}
Posted by francois at 6:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
