While the in-browser feed readers are convenient they are still quite rudimentary. You should consider switching to a full-fledged feed aggregator for more features and increased usability. There are many feed readers to choose from, each have different levels of complexity and features. There are essentially two types: web-based and application-based. With a web-based aggregator you can check your feeds from any computer but this comes at the cost of limited functionality and speed. With application-based feed readers you get excellent features and speed but lack mobility. You dont have to decide just yet, Ill go over configuring both types.

First off, well start with a web-based feed reader. The most best and popular online feed reader, in my opinion, is Bloglines. Sign up for an account and click My Feeds on the top left. Test out Bloglines by adding a few feeds. When you setup Bloglines for the first time, it will suggest a few feeds to subscribe to. I usually do not accept them and just add my own. Below My Feeds should be a Add link that you will click.

You will be on a subscribe page now. If you found the feed on the website you can paste that in here. However, Bloglines has a feature where you can just type in the URL of the website and it will search for feeds. It may find several feeds and other times it will not find any.

To avoid confusion about which feed to use, I suggest using the one shown on the website as that is the one they want you to use. Sometimes they will place a link to their FeedBurner feed and forget to remove the old feed. Either way, whether you enter a feed or URL, click Subscribe and use the default options. Do this several times with some more feeds and you will have setup Bloglines. Everytime you login you can click My Feeds and instantly find out how many of your feeds have new posts you have not read yet. Unread feeds will be bolded and have the number of new stories in parentheses. Bloglines provides a simple way to read RSS feeds from anywhere, but is not the fastest and most feature-rich solution.

What is RSS?

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”. It is a mode to easily distribute a list of headlines, update notices, and now and again content to a wide number of people. It is used by computer programs that organize those headlines and notices for easy reading.
What problem does RSS solve?

Mainly people are interested in many websites whose content changes on an irregular schedule. Examples of such websites are news sites, community and religious organization information pages, product information pages, medical websites, and weblogs. Repeatedly checking all website to see if there is any new content can be very tedious.

Email notification of changes was an early solution to this problem. Unfortunately, when you receive email notifications from multiple websites they are usually disorganized and can get overwhelming, and are often mistaken for spam.

RSS is a better mode to be notified of new and changed content. Notifications of changes to multiple websites are handled easily, and the results are presented to you well organized and distinct from email.
How does RSS work?

RSS works by having the website author maintain a list of notifications on their website in a standard way. This list of notifications is called an “RSS Feed”. People who are interested in finding out the latest headlines or changes can check this list. Special computer programs called “RSS aggregators” have been developed that routinely access the RSS feeds of websites you care about on your behalf and organize the results for you. (RSS feeds and aggregators are and now and again called “RSS Channels” and “RSS Readers”.)

Producing an RSS feed is very simple and hundreds of thousands of websites now provide this feature, including major news organizations like the New York Times, the BBC, and Reuters, as well as many weblogs.
What information does RSS provide?

RSS provides very necessary information to do its notification. It is made up of a list of items presented in order from newest to oldest. all item usually consists of a simple title describing the item along with a more complete description and a link to a web page with the authentic information being described. From time to time this description is the full information you want to read (such as the content of a weblog post) and now and again it is just a summary.

RSS aggregator programs

Think of an RSS aggregator as just a web browser for RSS content. RSS aggregators routinely check a series of RSS feeds for new items on an ongoing basis, making it is possible to keep track of changes to multiple websites without needing to tediously read and re-read all of the websites yourself. They detect the additions and present them all together to you in a solid and useful manner. If the title and description of an item are of interest, the link can be used to quickly bring the related web page up for reading.

How do I find out if a website has an RSS feed?

It is getting more and more common for websites to have RSS feeds. They usually indicate the existence of the feed on the home page or main news page with a link to “RSS”, or now and again by displaying an orange button with the letters “XML” or “RSS”. RSS feeds are and often found via a “Syndicate This” link. Text “RSS” links now and again (there are lots of variations) point to a web page explaining the nature of the RSS feeds provided and how to find them. The buttons are often linked directly to the RSS feed file itself.

Once you know the URL of an RSS feed, you can provide that address to an RSS aggregator program and have the aggregator monitor the feed for you. Several RSS aggregators come preconfigured with a list to choose from of RSS feed URLs for popular news websites.
How is the RSS feed file produced?

Unless you are maintaining a website or want to create your own RSS feed for some other purpose, how the RSS feed is produced should not be of concern and you may skip this section.

The special XML-format file that makes up an RSS feed is usually created in one of a variety of ways.

Mainly large news websites and a good number weblogs are maintained using special “content management” programs. Authors add their stories and postings to the website by interacting with those programs and and use the program’s “publish” facility to create the HTML files that make up the website. Those programs often and can update the RSS feed XML file at the same time, adding an item referring to the new story or post, and removing less recent items. Blog creation tools like Blogger, LiveJournal, Movable Type, and Radio routinely create feeds.

Websites that are produced in a more custom manner, such as with Macromedia Dreamweaver or a simple text editor, usually do not routinely create RSS feeds. Authors of such websites either maintain the XML files by hand, just as they do the website itself, or use a tool such as Software Garden, Inc.’s ListGarden program to maintain it. There are and services that every so often read requested websites themselves and try to routinely determine changes (this is a good number reliable for websites with a somewhat regular news-like format), or that let you create RSS feed XML files that are hosted by that service provider.

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Social Media Research: Blogs And Twitter Use Trends Inside US Corporations Do top US corporations use social media? Is the business world leveraging new media technologies to engage customers? The answer is definitely positive according to a new research study on 2009 Fortune 500 companies and their use of social media tools, like blogs and Twitter and authored by Nora Ganim Barnes and Eric Mattson. Photo credit: Kheng Ho Toh and Dmitriy Shironosov Each year Fortune Magazine compiles a list of the largest US corporations, which are named the Fortune 500 given their size and wealth. Due to the hugely influential role that these companies play in the corporate world, studying their use of new media technologies offers valuable insights into the future of social media communication technologies and approaches. That is why every year, Nora Ganim Barnes and Eric Mattson take Fortune 500 companies as a testing ground to analyze the use of blogs and Twitter inside the corporate world. In their latest report, published here, these are their reported highlights: Corporate blog use is steadily increasing, especially among the lower-ranked group of Fortune 500 corporations. All higher-ranked corporations have a Twitter account, as well as almost all other companies in the lower positions of the Fortune 500 list 86% of the 108 corporate blogs examined are linked to a Twitter account All 173 corporate Twitter accounts analyzed were active with replies and retweets in the past 30 days, showing a persistent interaction with other users. Podcasting and videos gained momentum among Fortune 500 companies. What emerges from this research is the steady adoption of blogs and the explosive growth of Twitter among Fortune 500 companies, which emphasizes the increasing importance of social media inside the business world. Specifically, this report suggests that Fortune 500 companies leverage social media technologies like blogs and Twitter as a mean to: Improve their communications approach, build internal knowledge, improve marketing and sales, guarantee long-term sustainability and growth. Given that Fortune 500 companies stand as an established model for business success, it is indeed strategically critical for you to examine the data inside this report and extract valuable, solid insights that may help you develop an effective social media marketing strategy. …

Online Publishing Strategy: What Robin Good Suggests Online publishing is in many respects the new frontier for those who have a voice, a business, a desire to communicate or change things for the better. It potentially enables any individual connected to the net to be a two-way communication hub capable of sending out information and equipped with technologies to listen and respond. But to transform such revolutionary opportunity into a truly effective marketing vehicle, or into a sustainable online business resource, takes a lot more than what we are told on blogs or on the many sites promoting how easy and fast it is to become a successful online publisher. Photo credit: Robin Good In reality, transforming the online publishing opportunity into something that one can leverage to reach and realize his own dreams, it is much more complex and hard than we are told. It takes lots of efforts, time, resources, expertise and skills which are not part, for the most, of our typical background and scholastic preparation. It requires the use of approaches and methods which sometimes counter what we have unconsciously learned through traditional media and that command lots of dedicated work to produce any significant results. But even the most fundamental, basic concepts of effective communication, sometimes seem to escape even those that command so well technology and new trends. It may be because some of us really never got to stop and study the mechanisms behind it, or simply because what we have been often seeing reported as professional communication has been nothing but the wrong approach to getting a message across and starting a true conversation. In these two short excerpts from my Dicole OZ show, recorded in Helsinki, this past December, you can grasp a little more of what I think is really essential to know to become a great and effective web publisher. …

Website Usability Testing: Guide To The Best Free Tools And Services Website usability testing identifies a precise methodology devoted to uncover specific bugs, idiosyncrasies and ambiguities in the way that website design impacts the effective use, legibility, navigation, and user experience of your website. In this MasterNewMedia guide you can find the best free website usability testing tools available out there. Heat map of MasterNewMedia homepage created with Feng-GUI Website usability testing is indeed a critical component of any effective online publishing strategy. When properly utilized, usability testing allows you to effectively scan and rapidly identify which are the critical issues to be addressed in your web publication that can improve legibility, the time visitors spend on your website or the ability to turn offers for products and services into actual conversions. In fact, what’s the point of having valuable content under your hood if your readers cannot easily discover it, share it and put it to effective use? To be of immediate “use“, let me share first with you a simple set of basic tasks you can follow to start testing and reviewing the usability of your own website: Identify a critical goal: Likely, you have multiple goals for your website. The first step is to focus on the most critical. Is it sales? Is it traffic? Is it help people find something? Use Personas: Create typical users profiles to best focus on potential needs and expectations of a fictional target group. Is your website addressed to experts in the filed or to a general audience? Do you want to attract loyal readers or occasional stumblers? Which age / sex / location are your users? Carry on critical tasks: After identifying your goals and creating typical users profiles (Personas), you want some friends, readers or volunteers, to carry on critical tasks on your website to identify areas for improvement and weaknesses. Is the sale process straightforward? Can people download your content easily? Are your blog posts easily shareable on social media? Collect the data: While your users go through a set of pre-determined tasks and perform specific actions on your website, you need to closely observe and report where they hesitate, step back, or remain confused by what they see on your site. Better yet, you can use a dedicated usability tool that collects absolute or relative data that can help you characterize the behavior of your testers. Review your analysis: Once you gather this data, you need to group it in clear-labeled groups (i.e. navigation, layout, functional flow, error handling, etc.), so that you can easily review and analyze all of this information and then find the ideal strategy to make your improvements. Now that you know what are the key steps needed to start a website usability test, what you really need is knowing which tools or services are available out there that you can immediately put to use to support, speed up and professionally organize those very tasks. But how can you identify and select which is the most appropriate website usability testing tool for your specific needs, competence level and budget? To help you get started right away, this guide provides you with a set of individual reviews, a comparative table and a comprehensive mindmap to help you select your ideal free website usability testing tool. Please note that these free usability testing tools have a limited range of features. For example, they do not allow you to record the screen of your testers or engage them in screen-sharing sessions unlike professional usability testing solutions like TechSmith Morae, which will be covered in a separate upcoming MasterNewMedia guide. Now that I have warned you about the limitations of these free website usability testing tools, here below are the specific selection criteria that I have used to compare these different services: Testing approach: a) Test the usability of your website by inviting specific users to share their feedback, b) analyze analytic and statistical data. Analytics: Generate automatic analytical data from each website usability testing tool to evaluate the the quality of your website design and user interface. Visualization of user behavior: Visualize the behavior of your visitors by analyzing where they click or look (via mouse tracking) on your website and which path they follow to carry on specific tasks. Usability report: Generate a comprehensive report that contains all the analytical data gathered by the usability test. …

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RSS feeds seem to be the breakout knowledge for the time. With additional users turning to them for driving traffic to their web site, its no wonder that a trail of RSS feed spam is following in the wake. A alert editing of your RSS feed possibly will make the difference between being classified as sincere content or RSS spam.

RSS search engines are just beginning to pick up steam. As new RSS feeds become searchable, the quantity of visitors will multiply and spam is surely to follow. It is an adverse side effect of free interaction. While RSS users can typically unsubscribe to feeds they deem as spam, browsing with keywords clothed in an RSS search engine is where the hindrance arises.

RSS spam largely consists of three main types generally often found in the RSS search engines. The initial type is keyword stuffing.

Keyword stuffing involves filling every RSS feed article with high-value keywords for a detailed topic. The articles are not intended for human visitors, but as an alternative for search engine robots to point traffic to a target web place. This RSS spam method is nothing more than an adaptation of the conventional keyword-stuffed web page, often banned by main search engines.

The next type involves RSS feed link farms. These RSS articles often contain very insignificant content, if any, other than a plain keyword. Their most important attraction is the feed title. Clicking the feed title takes the user to a blog containing tens or hundreds of other blogs and RSS feeds, every one directing to additional links inside the farm. The goal of this type of RSS spam is to trick the user into clicking advertisements or else directing them to a product web site.

The third type is the innovation of fake RSS feeds. These appear like legitimate, but often duplicated, article content. Whether they provide quantity or not is certainly debatable. These feeds are generally shaped in bulk, using automated scripts, and appear like in nature to the link farms. By attracting the users to seemingly valuable content, they wish to add advertisement clicks or product web site traffic.

Your RSS feed might happen to fall into one of these three categories. While you might at present be experiencing increased traffic from the RSS search engines, these directories are working on filtering out the RSS spam techniques. However, you can still take benefit of RSS feeds and their power by following an RSS-friendly guideline.

Refrain from using automated scripts to create online content used by your RSS feeds. As a substitute, compose your own original opinion, product descriptions, and reviews. It takes a little additional time, but the search engines will appreciate this content much more highly, your visitors will recognize the value of the unique content, and the subscription count to your RSS feed will grow. It is also crucial to keep your feed updated with changing content as opposed to using a static feed, which remains the same. Search engines respect dynamic feeds and will likely rank you higher as a consequence.

At hand are tools and services existing, which aid in keeping an RSS feed updated with your changing content. Such services include FeedFire for converting your web site content to a periodically updated RSS feed or software such as FeedForAll for creating and editing RSS feeds.

A thriving RSS feed is very much the same as a doing well web page. It may perhaps take a little more time to digitize your judgment, but the end conclusion is well worth the effort. By avoiding the tricks in RSS feed spam, you can help make the difference in quality of feeds and enjoyment in your readers.

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