FeedBurner – Part 1, About Feed Syndication

This is part 1 in our series about Feedburner.
See part 2 here.

FeedBurner does a great job of summing up the Blog/Feed/Rss/Atom world here.

 

Consumer Bottom Line: RSS makes reviewing a large number of
sites in a very short time possible.

Publisher Bottom Line: RSS permits instant distribution
of content updates to consumers.

As a website owner running a blog for SEO as well as the greater good, your role is to publish highly-relevant RSS content. Your write the content, the blogging tool takes care of the RSS. 

Some consumers use an online server and others use desktop applications to read your content. From the consumer’s perspective, your blog content is one of many feeds streaming into their tool for consumption. Because these consumers subscribe to these feeds, they are, by definition, targeted consumers.

For publishing, FeedBurner suggests TypePad or Blogger (I used Blogger to compose this entry).

For consuming on the desktop, FeedBurner suggests FeedDemon, NetNewsWire.

For consuming online, FeedBurner suggests NewsGator, Bloglines and My Yahoo!

FeedDemon
FeedDemon’s role is as feed analyst. Just like we use web analysis to track web site hits and click-throughs, we use FeedDemon to track blog hits and click-throughs.

In our next post, we’re going to step through applying FeedDemon’s tools to this blog.