That's right—I have 11,072 unread items on my feed reader. All of it pretty much equates to me being way behind on my subscriptions. I am either subscribed to too many feeds, engaged in too many other things to bother, uninterested in the feeds which I am subscribed to, or a combination of all three. It would appear that it is time to fix this problem right now.

Obviously, I am subscribed to way too many feeds, but I have to be keep on top of things. How can we solve this problem? First, I could use a feed filtering service like AideRSS, illumio, or FilterMyRSS. Next, I could use the abilities within many feed reading applications to discover content that has only the content I want within the feed (alternatively, I could exclude this content as well)—NetNewsWire and FeedDemon offers functionality like this. Finally, I use services like TechMeMe, Reddit, and Digg to get only the best news out there.

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Follow-Up to Search Engine and Social Media Shenanigans: Yahoo! Blocks Other SEs From Spidering Del.icio.us?

OK, Yahoo! blocks spider from other search engines. Who cares?

How-To create your own copy of your del.icio.us bookmarks

It is as simple as creating a local copy of all your bookmarks stored at del.icio.us. Basically you have two pretty easy possibilities:

1. Static del.icio.us copy via export
2. Syncing your del.icio.us feed into an RSS feed aggregator

And maybe somebody has some cool ready made del.icio.us API solutions to offer (I don't).

Let's elaborate about the two mentioned possibilities...

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I have recently changed my RSS feed to publish only part of the blog post, and this has drastically reduced the amount of splogs stealing my content. The downside is that syndicates who I have given permission to do not want to publish my content, unless it is published in it’s entirety.

I could and probably should fight these sploggers head on and publish my content in full, but as a blogger who writes in his spare time, it simply is not time effective for me to spend all my time contacting web hosts etc asking them to take the content down.

I’m sure there must be a solution, where I can stop them stealing the content – does anyone have any thoughts or ideas on this?

Oops, my article was deleted by i.e. Akismet.
Do you have an automatic backup solution?

My backup is my feed reader

I wrote an article in 2006 about a simple solution to create a backup while writing an article: Productivity: Clipboard as Auto Save. Now I stumbled over another great possibility to automatically backup my articles. My preferred feed reader BlogBridge offers the great feature to automatically save incoming feed items. Edit: Checking the BlogBridge service plan I see that you need at least the basic plan for $5/3months (which I have) to get the described feature.

BlogBridge can automatically save articles and/or enclosures.

How-To backup a feed with BlogBridge

1. Select a feed.
2. Go to the feed properties.
3. Choose the 'Advanced' tab.
4. Activate 'Automatically save articles' and /or enclosures
5. Choose a folder where to store the articles. In my case it is ".../Text/Backup - Performancing/from BlogBridge".
6. Choose a file format. In my case it is "YYYY-MM-DD - Title".

Bingo. Say 'OK' and you are done.

• In the future every new incoming feed item is stored as an HTML file.
• All the formatting is saved!

Of course you have to have a full feed to get this backup plan working.

Bonus: ReBlogging with BlogBridge

BlogBridge as archive and research tool.

• If you have one of the pro-versions of BlogBridge you are able to post to your blog.
• Select an article, push 'B' and an editor will pop up.
• Edit the content as you like and then you are ready to post.
• Archive and/or research solution: For your own feeds I recommend to set a high purge limit. For my performancing.com blog the setting is '500'.

How great is that?

Use mini blogs to enhance your blog and your single articles!

The idea of using asides is not new but still something most bloggers don't think about. Why? Simply because most bloggers are article oriented. Beside publishing the 'big' content you should always have an eye on enhancing your content.

One of the easiest ways to cover small aside content on your blog is to find a way to publish the small snippets in your template automatically at an appropriate place. If you use the grid concept or simply little divs floating at the right place doesn't matter.

How to create a mini blog for your site

How to get those snippets? I find it very easy and useful to write mini blogs by using good and short notes for my del.icio.us bookmarks and/or good descriptions on Flickr.

If you use the (tag) feed output of those sites you can have a nice publishing form on your blog. If the produced content is directly in your code and not generated by some JavaScript widget you will gain additional search engine love too!

My workflow for a mini blog

Very often I do a research on a certain subject and during that research publish a lot of useful mini-blog content by bookmarking found pages on del.icio.us. Tag those bookmarks appropriately and you have a great enhancement for your blog.

On my local news site in Hamburg Sankt-Georg.Info you will find the latest ten of my del.icio.us bookmarks tagged 'Hamburg' in the sidebar (which is only on that homepage not in the single article template).

The same technique is reproducable for every single article. You just have to tag your mini blog content right.

I am using the SimplePie plugin for Textpattern to fetch the RSS feeds and publish them directly in my code (Links to d.i.u. feed outputs).

It is up to your imagination what you can do with those mini blogs...

Fresh from the press ... Not much to say more than that my favorite RSS reader BlogBridge is available in version 6.0. I am using the weekly version since, well, a very long time now, and that Java beast is handling all my feeds (over 1,000) absolutely fine.

Pito Salas, the project leader, is saying it proud and clear:

Yes, sportsfans, we are very proud to announce that BlogBridge 6.0, (in our opinion) the most powerful blog and feed reader, is now available for immediate download. This is the culmination of 6 months of intense development, innovating in many areas, and refining, speeding up and smoothing out others

Source: BlogBridge 6.0, on our shelves right now!

For a quick glance check out: Visual Tour - Does Your Aggregator Do This?

PS: It is possible to post articles (and whole feeds) directly from BlogBridge. Have a look at BB Service - Plans. I am using the basic plan and it is one of the fastest way to blog directly from reading a feed to your blog.

Most of you know that I'm lazy and that I don't adopt new web apps and technology unless I'm convinced that it will be around 12 months from now. I usually just go with a minimalist approach to everything and it seems to work well (otherwise I'd be bogged down trying every new thing under the sun and wouldn't accomplish any real work).

I figure that there are lots out there like me. You take your time before adopting new methods and new technologies. That's why I created the weekly "Four Questions for the Performancing Community" series of posts. I figure that together we can probably come to a consensus about important issues more easily than on our own.

This week's 4 questions surround reader subscription models.

1. What forms of subscription do you offer on your blog (RSS, Email Digest, Newsletter, etc) and how do you encourage subscription signups?

2. Do you, or do you plan, to monetize your subscription base?

3. If you offer multiple forms of subscription (RSS, Email Digest, Newsletter, etc.) do you worry about spreading your subscription base too thin for monetization?

4. Do you worry that RSS subscribers avoid your website and are thus less monetizable? How do you plan to rectify the situation?

Google's rumored (and now confirmed) purchase of FeedBurner has gotten plenty of press, but for all the wrong reasons. While everyone is weighing in as to whether the purchase is more about mindshare or monetizing RSS feeds, there has been very little said about the implications of this move on the future of SEO in general and link building specifically.

Now that this deal has gone through, Google has gained access to millions of pieces of user-data which collectively is a very reliable separate indicator of user preferences. Coupled with their SE algorithm, these RSS subscriber figures will provide Google with a set of end-user preferences which is far more comprehensive and thus difficult for SEO's to game.

For example, if a site has a top-notch backlink footprint but less than a dozen feed subscribers it's a certain red flag to GOOG that the site might not be as trustworthy as its backlink profile suggests.

If Google is planning on incorporating feed subscription figures and Google Toolbar browsing data to go along with with a site's backlink footprint into SE rankings, we're going to be looking at an entirely new and far more complex game for SEO's and traditional "link builders".

While this change, if it occurs at all, is still six months out, now is the time to start considering the implications of this shift and how it will affect ranking strategies. I can think of a few things we're likely to see the day after this shift in the algo is made public:

+TLA Feeds - "Publishers rent out your RSS subscriptions"

+PayPerTraffic - "Rent regular traffic by users with active Google Toolbars"

+Accessibility becomes a more central component in SE rankings as having your site render properly in obscure browsers means more feed subscribers.

+Under the table RSS subscription rings replacing Social Media voting rings

+Every Webmaster switches their RSS feed to Feedburner

Maybe I'm just paranoid, but as I see it, those of us that make a living off of ranking well are about to have to step up our game.

I’ve seen a rise in our RSS subscription rate so I guess I am now obligated to keep these going. w.blogger is giving me some strange error and I didn’t want to take the time away from Tonights post to troubleshoot.

First, I read Today (or was it Yesterday) in SEOFeed (I think, I read so many articles in a day) that Web 2.0 was over and done, that it was time to get ready for Web 3.0. My first reaction was; we need a better name for it. Whatever it is, my thoughts are hopefully we completely move away from machines determining the relevance of web content, in other words I think Web 2.0 was a balance between bots and humans deciding what was cool … and hopefully Web 3.0 (aw c’mon can’t we call call it ’super mega web’ or something) will be a purely people driven thing. I really like BlogBridge and think that tool is cutting edge stuff.

This brings me to the point where we were unsure if we should talk about this experiment, our results aren’t really in yet but it’s a bit of a ‘no brainer’. I’ll start here: Ready? While the RSS spec does contain … or tagging if you will, it is rarely used. My first shock was to see this at Amazon and in BlogBridge (BlogBridge also has rating) so I dug into the suggestions for RSS tagging and found this form [foo]. That makes sense for del.icio.us but I think the larger question is does generic tagging work ie. www.mydomain.com/tag/ rel=foo? This is one of the many things we’re testing and I promise the results shortly.

We do a lot of testing with Autodiscovery and see huge potential for the RSS extentions ‘category’ and ‘new’ … just look at what Amazon is doing and it should be pretty clear that XML-RPC and RSS can do it all, simply and elegantly.

I guess that’s all for now - we don’t get many comments so what the heck, why don’t you click and tell me I am full of it or something? Oh, this kinda shaped my view of Blogging and sharing our experiments … I saw Fishkin explaining that the reason they got started in the ‘Info’ part of SEO was because it was a struggle any other way. I agree, we don’t expect to compete with the big boys (have I mentioned recently that Bruce Clay is just a few blocks down the road from here) but perhaps a few folks will find our research interesting and spread the word. We are proud of our little think tank. I can speak for all of us when I say we love our work, we are [ex]-engineers so we thrive on the pressure.

Well, that’s our Blog for Today. Sure would be interested in your experiences with RSS-SEO.

Dave,
CE - PSEM - RELAX SEO Services
www.relaxseo.com

Those of us who are primarily political bloggers tend to find that we get buried in blog feeds from time to time. We try to keep up on the latest topics, find blogs that are watching those topics, add their feeds to our readers and promptly forget why they're there. In fact, before long our feed readers become a prison rather than the tools they're supposed to be.

But if you want to keep up with things, you're going to need to use feeds to do it. Does this necessarily mean getting crushed with too much information? No, it doesn't, and I'd like to use this post to suggest some time-saving ways of getting your information.

Those of you who use Bloglines may have encountered their new "Playlists" feature. This is hugely beneficial for quick sweeps of information. By creating new playlists, you can see all the most recent headlines for all the feeds in that list at a glance, thereby eliminating the need to click through every single feed looking for what you need.

But of course, relying on other people's blogs to be informed isn't always a good option. After all, even if they're informed on your topic, they may not always talk about things you need to know. No sense wading through someone's reality when you don't have to. As a solution to this, there is the little-discussed set of tools from Google, their news and blog search feeds. If you search for a topic on either of these two sections of Google and look to the left, you will see links to get the RSS or Atom feed. That's not just any old feed, that's basically a custom feed of your search terms! Any new blog posts or news items (respectively) that fit the criteria of your search will immediately become available to your new feed. Of course, you may need to fiddle with your search terms to get what you want, but with patience you can get a laser-sharp search going and be straight on top of the whole issue!

How about Yahoo!Pipes? Ever heard of them? Well, here's a great way to mash up a bunch of individual feeds into one, thereby eliminating the need for feed after feed of information. With a bit of practice and creativity, you could potentially search all the major news or blog search services at once and have all that information plugged into a new feed for your reader!

These are just a few creative suggestions to boost your productivity and hone your research to make you a more on-point blogger. What other ways have you found to make managing all that blogosphere more manageable?