FeedBurner Terms of Service Update
August 19, 2009 on 11:10 am | In Uncategorized | Comments Off As a natural conclusion to the process of migrating feedburner.com accounts to Google Accounts as previously described here, we have decided to sunset the legacy Feedburner Terms of Service. The Google Terms of Service will be the terms that apply to your use of Feedburner. These Google Terms of Service are the same terms that apply to many other Google products and services, including your Google Account.As a reminder, the advertising portions of the service are now covered by the AdSense Terms and Conditions and the accompanying Google AdSense Program Policies.
Category Filtering beta now available for AdSense for feeds English-language ads
August 17, 2009 on 3:33 pm | In Uncategorized | Comments Off Like we announced on the more general Inside AdSense blog a couple weeks ago, we have extended our category filtering beta to English-language ads on the AdSense network, which we are happy to announce includes ads that appear in AdSense for feeds.This feature allows to you filter ads in up to five categories such as Dating, Drugs and Supplements, Weight Loss, and Get Rich Quick. Your filters will be applied to English-language ads, no matter how they were targeted.
To have these settings take effect for your feeds, from Ad Review Center, make sure you select a Client-ID that starts with ca-feed-pub. Note that this allows you to select different categories for your feed than for your site, but also means you will need to select filters for both your feed and your site in order for filters to be applied to both these content types.
To see whether category filtering has been enabled for your location, sign in and visit the Ad Review Center, located under the 'AdSense Setup' tab. We're working on expanding this beta to additional languages and countries, and will be sure to announce any updates here on the blog. If you'd like to learn more about category filtering, please visit our Help Center.
To have these settings take effect for your feeds, from Ad Review Center, make sure you select a Client-ID that starts with ca-feed-pub. Note that this allows you to select different categories for your feed than for your site, but also means you will need to select filters for both your feed and your site in order for filters to be applied to both these content types.
To see whether category filtering has been enabled for your location, sign in and visit the Ad Review Center, located under the 'AdSense Setup' tab. We're working on expanding this beta to additional languages and countries, and will be sure to announce any updates here on the blog. If you'd like to learn more about category filtering, please visit our Help Center.
What’s all the hubbub about PubSubHubbub?
July 10, 2009 on 6:42 pm | In Uncategorized | Comments Off One of the questions we get from publishers most often is "How do I make sure updates to my feed are delivered to feed readers as fast as possible?" We know this is important to our publishers' businesses and we are constantly making improvements to our back-end systems to minimize the time from when you publish a post to when it appears to subscribers in feed readers.Recently there have been a lot of developments around the so-called "real-time" web. The promise of the real-time web is distributing new information as quickly as possible. This encourages users to engage in more active participation online and makes the web more dynamic than ever before. However, so far the real-time web has not been easily accessible by feed publishers using their existing infrastructure.
Today we're happy to announce initial support in FeedBurner for the PubSubHubbub protocol. 'Hubbub is an open specification in draft for web-scale publish and subscribe. The protocol can be used to transform any existing Atom and RSS feed on the web into a real-time stream. Best of all, it's open, free, and decentralized like the rest of what makes the web so great: No single organization controls the protocol or how it's used.
As of right now, burned feeds with the PingShot service enabled are automatically enhanced with the PubSubHubbub protocol. We'll add the required discovery elements to these feeds and notify a Google-run Hub, running on App Engine, of publish events. We also convert any pings we receive into 'Hubbub events. That means for many of our publishers out there, your existing feeds are available as real-time streams right now. Like, immediately. This very moment.
If you are a publisher and are not already using our PingShot service, turning it on is easy. From feedburner.google.com, visit the Publicize tab for your feed, select PingShot, and click the [Activate] button at the bottom of the page. From your AdSense account, go to Manage Ads, then click View Feed Stats link, and do the same thing. That's it.
If you manage a service that would like to receive updates to the millions of FeedBurner feeds that use this service as soon as possible, or just want to know more about the PubSubHubub protocol, we encourage you to check out our project on Google Code. There are open-source clients for Python, Perl, PHP, Ruby, and WordPress. We have an open-source reference implementation of a Hub built on Google App Engine. And there are other Hub implementations built and run by other companies. Please let us know what you think in the PubSubHubub Google Group!
Posted by Steve Olechowski, on behalf of the FeedBurner Team
Happiness is more subject in your subject line.
July 2, 2009 on 6:06 pm | In Uncategorized | Comments Off If a certain lack of variety has weighed on the format of your day-to-day, feed-to-email deliveries, things are looking up at last. Recent advances in dollar-sign technology have brought some strange and fascinating new capabilities to the Email Branding section of FeedBurner's Email Subscriptions feature. Read on, ostensibly for the many useful pictures and descriptions, but really for the danger and excitement only a new checkbox can bring.First, sign in to your Google Account on FeedBurner and then click your feed's title, then Publicize > Email Subscriptions > Email Branding.
Always want to feature the title of the latest post in your subject line? Just put ${latestItemTitle} in the Email Subject/Title textbox:
Do you often have more than one post per day? You can help your readers uncover exactly how many new missives you've got planned for them in each update. Check the "Change Subject…" box and reveal a secondary subject line to use when 2 or more feed posts are delivered in a single email.
Behold! The mythical "almost empty" inbox. But in this case, the most recent post's subject line, thanks to ${latestItemTitle}, is right in this FeedBurner-delivered email, shining through.
Have fun with this new feature, but please note that ${pithyRetort}, ${iambicPentameter}, and ${heartfeltApology} are not yet supported.
Be it declared, a map for every feed!
June 15, 2009 on 1:51 am | In Uncategorized | Comments Off One of the most compelling reasons that publishers choose FeedBurner is that it gives them the tools to record and analyze how many users are consuming their content. Late last week, we launched an enhancement to our item statistics that enables publishers to get a bit more information about those users. Similar to the feature by the same name in Google Analytics, the "Map Overlay" page provides a breakdown of the previous day's item statistics from a geographic perspective.For feeds with item stats enabled, clicking on the "Map Overlay" item from feedburner.google.com will bring you the page. From your AdSense account, click on Manage Ads and then on "View Feed Stats" for the feed whose map you wish to view.
At the top, you'll find a world map visualization that shows countries with more item views as more intense shades of green.
Hovering over a country shows the name of the country and the exact number of item views.
Below the map is a table, which lists the top 25 countries by number of item views.
Hopefully, you will be able to use these data to better tailor content to your readership, and target lackluster markets. If you are one of our publishers who sells your own ads in feeds using Google Ad Manager, this will help you better target your subscribers. Or, just reveling in the world-wide reach of a feed is pretty satisfying too.
And remember, it's important that you follow our instructions to make sure you are directing all your traffic to FeedBurner.
Posted by Greg Kick, FeedBurner Engineering Team
And remember, it's important that you follow our instructions to make sure you are directing all your traffic to FeedBurner.
Posted by Greg Kick, FeedBurner Engineering Team
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