Update - Feedburner (BuzzBoost)

Location: Chicago

Previous Profiles: June 14, 2005, July 4, 2005

What’s New?

FeedBurner has been launching a ton of new features lately, and BuzzBoost, announed on July 11, is worth noting.

In their own words, “Enter BuzzBoost. It’s the latest publicity and awareness offering for FeedBurner publishers, and it’s free. BuzzBoost’s job is to redisplay your feed content anywhere you can copy and paste a short snippet of HTML code â€” in a Blogger or TypePad page template, on a corporate website, or even in a “signature” block on a message board. BuzzBoost code is just a short line of JavaScript that displays content items and information from a FeedBurner feed according to settings you provide. You get to control how BuzzBoost displays the following elements:

* Feed Title
* Item publication date
* Individual item headlines, headlines and plain text, or headlines and original HTML
* Plain text item excerpt length
* Link to download podcast enclosures (if available)

We know that publishers who are familiar with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) would also want to precisely control the styling of whatever BuzzBoost generates. Therefore, BuzzBoost has the right hooks in the generated HTML to make sure you can style each of BuzzBoost’s elements, which we have documented (see the links at the bottom of this post.)”
Link

Tris Hussey at Qumana posted about this a few days ago and saw the power of it immediately – you can cross promote blogs, and use any RSS feed in new ways. For instance, Tris is thinking about taking RSS feeds of prospective search queries and promoting them through buzzboost – very creative! This isn’t new technology, it’s just a very easy and cool implementation.

Feedburner will create an html script for you based on your parameters, or you can take the source html and entirely customize it.

To use it, if you already have burned feeds at Feedburner, click on “publicize” from the control panel area, and choose “buzzboost”.