Olson’s Observations

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).

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.

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.

With all of the video widget companies launching lately my thoughts turned again to the widget and what it means to the distribution of content. Of course the widget is a new form of content distribution that will allow content to be transported easier than it ever has before but what else do widgets mean to content producers? They mean we can share the content we consume with our audiences in ways we couldn’t before, at least not in an easy way.

As most of you know, I have started including all of the posts I read and find interesting in the “Posts Worth Reading” section on the far right side of the site. Initially I did it because I thought it was fun from a technology perspective and I wanted to play with all of Google Reader’s features (oh, and Rick and Jake were doing so the peer pressure was there). I never knew if there would be much value there for all of you but I had a feeling there would.

As I started to see the stats come it confirmed the suspicians I had. You guys loved the links to all the posts I had found interesting. It makes a lot of sense since I spend a lot of time reading up on certain things and I would be able to find the most interesting posts thus saving you all a lot of sifting. This looks a lot like the major media sources who have built up trust with the communities they serve and can act as a content recommender.

Now there is a new service that allows bloggers (and others) to create personal network search widgets. Lijit, based in Colorado, is helping content producers and inidividuals share all of their content with their readers and networks. For example, I can put together a search that uses my LinkedIn contacts, Flickr photos, MySpace page, Olson’s Observations, my delicious links and anything else you can think of as the base.

The idea hinges on the fact that readers of this blog would want to search all of the other things I am consuming or producing in order to find other great stuff. Seems like a pretty good idea considering the popularity of the “Posts Worth Reading” section on this site.

I’d love to hear what you guys think of this. Do you think people that read certain people want to know what those people are reading, viewing and creating? I do and I bet you guys do too. In a world with an over abundance of content we all need trusted filters and widgets will allow our trusted filters to provide links to the best of the best in terms of content.

Read/Write Web put out a great piece today regarding the adoption of web 2.0 services by mainstream media. The good news is it looks like the mainstream media companies are adopting the new ideas and it looks like Time is leading the pack. Now that the mainstream media is using web 2.0 services it will be interesting to see what the usage of those services by their readers looks like but that’s a whole other post. In this post I’d like to discuss the feed side of things.

As you can see from the Read/Write web chart below, feeds seem to be the most prevalent of services with every site surveyed having at least one.

Since just about every mainstream media company now has feeds the automatic Internet Explorer 7 upgrade from a couple months ago and the launch of Microsoft Vista are even more significant.

Both IE7 and Vista have built in feed reading platforms meaning that many of the worlds’ computer users will now be shown feeds for the first time. In fact, IE7 has a great way of presenting and describing feeds that treats them more like bookmarks which people can easily understand (yes, I know firefox has done this for a while but more of the mainstream audience are IE users and have not seen that).

As we all know, the value proposition of feeds is a no brainer so once these users give them a shot they will likely be hooked (hopefully so hooked that they start looking at independent content as well and subscribing to it).

It is looking like 2007 will be the year of the feed in terms of mainstream audience adoption which gets me very excited since I sleep and live and breathe feeds, syndication and distributed media every day at FeedBurner. We’re just about across the chasm now and it feels good (there has to be a song in there somewhere).

The Media 2.0 Workgroup launched today and I am happy to be a part of it. The group will include people from many different perspectives including the people fighting hard to bring large media companies into the future, people who work to build tools for new media, people who have built new media empires from the ground up and the list goes on from there.

My site definitely pales in comparison to others in the group including Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0, Ian Forrester of the BBC, Jeff Pulver of Pulver Media and Stowe Boyd of /Message which are good reads. I am also honored to be in the company of good friends like Frank Gruber of AOL who co-founded TECH cocktail with me and writes a great blog. I know I am going to learn a lot form the members of the group and I only hope that I can add some insight into the mix.

From the release:

“The Media 2.0 Workgroup is a group of industry commentators, agitators, and innovators who believe the phenomena of democratic participation will change the face of Media Creation, Distribution and Consumption. Join the conversation…”

Joining the conversation is what it’s all about so get in there and start participating and learning with the rest of us!

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.