Bloggers Buzz

BusinessBlogWire has asked Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today the question How to Stop Bog Content Scrapers? His answers include RSS Feed security and reporting content scrapers to advertisers.

Tags: blogging, blogs, blogging news, rss, plagiarism, blog tips,

Feedburner has announced additional features added to their email service:

Subscription management

* Activate, deactivate, and (now) delete individual email addresses
* Receive an optional email when people subscribe or unsubscribe

Communication preferences

* Customize the subject line and body text of the confirmation email sent to subscribers after they opt-in to receive your feed by email. (Handy for using hundreds of languages other than FeedBurnerese.)

Email Branding

* Customize the subject line and title of the email that is sent to your subscribers
* Add an image or logo to appear at the top of HTML email messages
* Change body and headline text fonts, sizes and colors, as well as text link colors

Delivery Options

* Choose your timezone
* Select a two-hour delivery window within which your daily digest will be sent

Tags: blogging, blogs, blogging news, feedburner, subscription services,

SEO, Business Blogging and Copywriting in the UK has highlighted the opportunities coming with Internet Explorer 7:

If up until now you haven’t taken any interest in RSS very soon you won’t have a choice. The imminent arrival of Internet Explorer 7 could well change the way information is found, distributed and read.

IE7 will make it easier than ever before to promote your news feed to visitors, and subscribing will be as simple as adding a new bookmark. IE7 will push RSS from the domain of just the web savvy and into the mainstream. Hold tight because there is about to be an RSS explosion and your business better be ready for it

Tags: blogging, blogs, blogging news, rss, feeds, news feeds,

Bloglines has vowed to fix some problems as they are Working to Make Things Better:

Bloglines recently experienced software difficulties that affect a small number of members who use some of our advanced features. For example, you may have saved some articles by clicking on “Keep as New” and found that it doesn’t link back to the saved posts. We have isolated the issue in a system that manages the data for Bloglines blogs and clippings (resulting in the interruption of those features as well for a few users) and our engineers are working to resolve this problem.

We sincerely apologize for the disruption and we’re working to make things right. We know how important these personalization features are to Bloglines fans (we all love them, too), and we appreciate your understanding and patience.

blogging, rss, feeds, rss readers, feed readers, bloglines,

Some news from NewsGator:

Denver, CO — Aug. 9, 2006 — Last night, NewsGator released beta versions of new toolbars for Firefox and Internet Explorer. These toolbars allow you to extend the NewsGator experience directly into the browsers. Key features include:

Discovery of and subscription to new feeds, straight from your browser, into NewsGator Online, NewsGator Inbox, or FeedDemon.

Autodiscovery of feeds as you browse the web and get information - like the number of NewsGator subscribers – or preview the feed before you subscribe.

Ability to right click “Subscribe with NewsGator” context menu in both IE and FireFox.

Keyword searches for new feeds

View of who’s linking to the pages you’re browsing and what they have to say about it.

The beta is available for download at http://www.newsgator.com/download/toolbar/ngtoolbarsetup.exe.

Update Techcrunch tells Bloglines to Watch Out! after reviewing the new toolbars

rss, feeds, feed readers, newsgator, foxfox, internet explorer,

Feedburner is testing Blog Networks according to Techcrunch:

Feedburner is testing a new product called “Networks” which are groups of blogs on a single topic that are using Feedburner to manage their RSS feed. The idea is to allow people to subscribe to a single mashed up feed containing all of the content from all of the blogs in that category.

Continues at Techcrunch Feedburner Testing Blog Networks

feedburner, rss, feeds,

Bloglines have posted on some issues users are having with feeds catching up:

We are aware that some users have been seeing inaccurate counts on their subscription lists. This is related to the maintanance we performed Wednesday, August 3rd which included upgrades to our databases. Unfortunately, due to the massive amount of data we store, many of the systems are taking a few days to catch up with work. There is no loss of data or functionality, but the sheer size of the synchronization is causing the inaccuracies in count to occur. We are working to speed up the synchronization and remove this bottleneck from the system in the future. In the meantime, we apologize for this inconvenience and disruption to your Bloglines reading rituals.

bloglines,

Bloglines has via their blog updated on their proposal to keep designated RSS feeds out of various search and aggregator indexes which works like this:

This issue bloggers and publishers are facing is similar to the issue robots.txt addressed. Sites that don’t want to be publicized or easily accessible to the masses use robots.txt to tell search engines not to crawl or index their pages without having to set up password authentication systems that would overly restrict their visitor community. By most accounts, the robots.txt standard has been largely successful in doing just that.

Our proposal for a Feed Access Control Standard is about creating a robots.txt-like standard for feeds. Bloggers and publishers who don’t want their feeds to be publicized will be able to tell search engines, aggregators and other feed crawlers to exclude their feed from listings, directories and search engine indexes.

We recognize that this proposed standard explicitly does not address republication. But just as robots.txt has done, it will act as a sign post to a search engine or an aggregator that a particular feed’s content (the content in the feed itself, not just on the page that is linked to from the feed) should not be indexed. Like a stop sign, the value is in making everyone aware of the rules of the road. As with any rule of the road, it relies on the community to adhere to it to prevent “accidents.”

Tags: bloglines, feeds, rss, syndication, feed readers, rss readers