Feedburner is testing a new product called “Networks” which are groups of blogs on a single topic that are using Feedburner to manage their RSS feed. The idea is to allow people to subscribe to a single mashed up feed containing all of the content from all of the blogs in that category. See this feed for the venture capital group as an example (which, by the way, I just subscribed to), which lists all of the posts from every blog in the network.
Feedburner has been silent on this, but two of their investors, Brad Feld from Mobius Venture Capital and Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures, blogged about it.
In his post Brad says Feedburner is testing a few networks, and Fred suggests sewing, garage music and scuba diving as examples of possible topice.
There are currently 17 feeds included in the VC network, listed here. The goal from a publishers perspective is to gain readers (and I assume a subscriber to the network counts in each of their individual feed counts), as well as advertising revenue, which Feedburner is now selling into feeds at reasonable CPMs (but, as I know from experience, very low sell through rates). The page linked above also lists total subscribers on those blogs. It’s not clear if they are double counting duplicate subscribers across multiple blogs or not.
The biggest issue around this will be what rules are used to determine which blogs are included in a given topic. It isn’t clear if there will be any real quality control – in his post Brad says each network will have a gatekeeper to make sure only blogs on topic are included, but there doesn’t appear to be any hurdle as to what constitutes a quality blog in a topic. That could work out badly. And if the bloggers and/or the network coordinator are making subjective decisions on which blogs can be included in a given network, this will end in tears. The politics around who’s in and who’s out of a blog network are impossible. I know this from personal experience.
Our previous posts on Feedburner are here.
an example of this is available right now on http://vc-chat.com/aggy/
Aggregating several feeds into one is better when one can personalize it, and that problem has already been solved, hasn’t it?
Feedburner got the new idea…
I am waiting it.
From the reader side this is a big yawn. All the tools I need exist already. In Bloglines (ugly as it is) I can group feeds into folders and I can turn any search into an aggregate feed to which I can then subscribe. I love FeedBurner, but it seems like they’re doing too much work for no good reason with this, and inviting all manner of problems to boot. So, exactly how does this help people who subscribe to feeds?
Finding good blogs on a particular topic is a problem for readers. (The aggregation issue is secondary here.) Top Ten Sources is a human-edited approach to this, but their editors are all internal (afaik). Memeorandum is another, but outsiders have no input on the ’seed’ blogs.
Feedburner Networks lets any blogger create topic feeds which his readers are likely to be interested in. What collections would Mike Arrington start? How about Guy Kawasaki? A lot of folks would like to know.
Boring. Not impressed. Put this in the Techcrunch Lame Pool – companies who have a good product but try new things that turn out lame!
Well, I posted on this on Webmetricsguru.com just now. I think FeedBurner is doing the easy part – just aggregate the networks and let the admin worry about the details.
Problem is, that’s not good enough in every case- your network is only going to be as good as the admin selecting the feeds.
I think this is a nice way for readers to quickly subscribe to a wide range of blogs on a single topic. Maybe not revolutionary, but it does ad some value.
Aggregated feeds are nothing new. Whether you aggregate them yourself or let technorati do it for you. The problem with aggregating them yourself, via your own feed reader for example, is that the feeds aggregated are limited to the feeds/blogs you know that exist on a particular topic. On the other hand, the problem with Technorati aggregating feeds for you is that there is no “quality index”.
It seems to me that FeedBurner networks solves these two problems by giving publishers a platform to create networks, catering to specific topics, that expose readers to new content and the issue of quality is managed by a human hand as opposed to a computer. Sounds like a good idea.
Thoughts?
Aggregating several feeds into one is better when one can personalize it, and that problem has already been solved, hasn’t it?
Top Ten Sources is a human-edited approach to this, but their editors are all internal (afaik). Memeorandum is another, but outsiders have no input on the ’seed’ blogs.
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