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I talk to publishers all day long about ways to allow others to promote their content but I never went ahead and set up something formal on Olson’s Observations… until now (sorry for the dramatics). I created a page today called resyndicate (see the top right hand side of the site) which gives users/readers three different ways to utilize the content from Olson’s Observations on their sites or anywhere else they choose (of course the only thing I ask for is attribution).

The three options I made available are: Headline Animator, SpringWidgets and BuzzBoost. These are all FeedBurner features that are super easy for publishers to implement and for others to use. Publishers can now even track the use of Headline Animator which makes that service more compelling.

Please check out my resyndicate page to get a feel for each of the options that are available. Why not even snag the code for any one of them and try it out on your own site. I’d love to hear any feedback you have about any or all of the resyndication techniques as well so please either e-mail me or leave comments if you feel so inclined. You can also set up a page of your own and, if you do, please post about it in the comments. I’d love to see more folks start doing this.

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John Mahoney of InstantInformation has kicked off a series of videos he calls Practical RSS. The aim of the videos is to teach potential feed consumers what the benefits of feeds are and how they can use the technology to better their web experience. The first video explains what feeds are and how to subscribe to and read feeds in very basic terms. The explanation is a good one and I, for one, am looking forward to more Practical RSS videos in the future. To check out show #1 just click the image below and if you want to make sure to catch all of the latest videos in the series you should subscribe to John’s blog (yes, I know he’s not using FeedBurner yet – I’m on it).

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Remember all of that audience engagement stuff I’ve been talking about lately? Well, we just made another step forward toward widget stats at FeedBurner today which is super exciting.

For those who don’t know, we have a service called Headline Animator that tens of thousands of our users, well, use. Headline Animator allows publishers to create a completely custom animated gif that cycles through the latest headlines in their feed. Check out Justin’s below as it’s a great example of what can be done:

This animated gif can be used just about anywhere on the web to promote ones content and that’s really neat but to make it wicked useful (excuse my Bostonian) we really needed to show publishers how many times their headline animator was viewed in a given day across the web. Consider that piece done (although we’ll keep improving it of course).

We now report Headline Animator stats along with site and feed stats to publishers and there’s more to come. I’ll leave the details to the official FeedBurner blog, Burning Questions, because Dick did a great job of describing everything over there so read his post if you get a chance. It’ll be well worth your time.

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With Google starting to report their numbers to us over the weekend, which increased our overall reported subscriptions by about 53%, we thought it was time to start looking at the feed market and for us to get a report out that could help publishers (and advertisers) understand the landscape a bit better. It took a lot of queries and a lot of time to sort through all of the numbers but we got it done and the FeedBurner feed market report is now live on our blog.

With a sample size of over 600,000 feeds which represent about 350,000 publishers we have unparalleled insight into what is happening in the world of feeds but there are still challenges that we face when trying to compare subscriber market share. The two main challenges are: not all subscribers are alike (feed readers report differently) and default feeds (feeds bundled of listed for new users of a newsreader) are popular meaning they have disproportionately high subscriber counts in the aggregators where they are defaults. Thus, we figured measuring market share based on subscribers may not be the best method. Luckily we had some more compelling data that lead us to the idea of Audience Engagement, or how many folks are clicking on or reading the content within the feed as a better measure of market share.

With the idea in hand we started looking at the click and item view data we had to see what the market looked like at this point in time. Rather than reposting all of our pie charts, graphs and notes here I urge you to check out the official post as it describes things much more eloquently than I could and it has some really slick graphics to accompany the text which I know you will love. I also urge you to check out (and subscribe to) the Publisher Tips blog for a glossary of feed terms and “Quick Hits” on each of the major feed readers that will help you understand how they function among other great tips that will help you get the most out of FeedBurner.

The main thing we should all remember is that we live in a world where media is becoming more and more distributed and the backbone of that distribution is the feed. With that in mind we are going to continually bring you new things like widgets and the stats to allow you to track their consumption. Our goal is to give you a complete view of your media consumption across all channels and to start linking the distribution channels’ stats together to produce an integrated view of your audience engagement (another post on that here). So stay tuned as there is a lot more to come.

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I am happy to report that our CEO, Dick Costolo, is now back to regular blogging with his new offering Ask the Wizard. Dick was inspired by Jason and Brad’s blog, Ask the VC, to get going again and to create a blog where he could answer some burning questions all entrepreneurs have about starting and running businesses.

Dick is not only an experienced entrerpreneur he’s also hillariously funny and full of sarcasm so the blog will be both useful and very entertaining. The topics covered already range from non-founder equity issues, bringing in outside directors and pitching companies. I have read each post and they are well worth your time (I swear I am not just saying that since he’s the big boss). Don’t believe me – check out Brad’s post.

Give the site a read and subscribe to the feed while you’re there. I am sure you’ll be glad you did. Glad to see you writing again Dick!

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We always knew it was true but now it’s in and print and you know what they say about stuff you read. Wait, was that don’t believe everything you read or do believe everything you read? Anyhow, our friends at ProfessionalRockstars.com actually took a shot at determining how much FeedBurner saves them in a given month for the folks at PC Magazine. The answer: $750

Not bad for a service that’s mostly free (Professional Rockstars uses the paid upgrade that costs $8 per month) and, if you are using the FeedBurner Ad Network, actually pays you. I wonder how much we save all of our 330,000 publishers in a given month. If anyone else wants to do a quick calc of what they think they save please do and let me know. A big thanks from the team and I to Chris and the rest of the Professional Rockstars crew for crunching the numbers. You guys rock (both literally and figuratively)!

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I had the pleasure of participating on the Internet and Interactivity panel today at the Chicago Motion Graphics Festival. As most of you know I have become very interested in video on the net after I met a lot of smart folks at PodCamp in Boston back in September so it was great to spend time with a lot of video producers and talk more about what is going on with video on the net and about feeds (which were new to a lot of folks).

The quick thought I want to share with you came from a co-panelist of mine, Nick Schmidt. We were talking a bit about how feeds are enabling the distribution of video on the net and Nick brought up a nice comparison to describe feeds. Nick described feeds to the audience as something similar to your TiVo.

Nick went on to say that, like your TiVo, through feeds you can tell programs like iTunes what content you want by subscribing to the feed of that content and the feed will bring you the latest content as it comes out. It’s a great way to think about feeds and I thank Nick for the comparison.

What’s also interesting about TiVo and feeds is that I believe you can now subscribe to content via feeds with your TiVo. Hopefully that will open up web based content and feeds to a whole new group of people. In the end of the day feeds allow you to get only the content (text, audio, video) you want and consume it when and where you want. Pretty sweet, eh?

If you like your TiVo and haven’t given feeds a try I urge you to do so. Plus, the vast majority of the content is free so there’s nothing to lose. Check out Network2 for some great web video you can subscribe to.