As I continue to play catch up, I notice that a couple of FeedBurner Pro services are now free (TotalStatsPro and MyBrand). Gotta love Google’s purchase of Feedburner, yes?

For customers I’m actively working with, I’ll be turning these on for you in the next week or so. For others (either no longer active or new to the family), Tickets are Available.

More to come…

Related Postings Elsewhere:
– ProNet Advertising
– BlogTutorials
– Digital Technology

In gardening, those who excel at growing and caring for roses will place high importance on pruning your rose bush, allowing light to reach the inside branches of the plant. Proper pruning allows for the plant to blossom to full potential.

If you’re just getting started reading RSS feeds, you may eventually find yourself with so many feeds – you may want to throw the whole thing away. Hold the phone, my gardening friend. Get your sheers out and let’s prune some of those feeds.

• Recent Reading Habits: If you haven’t read an item from a feed in a couple weeks, might be a good signal that it has become dead wood. Prune it.
• Too Many Items: If you can’t keep up with all the items (does this feed post 10 items every day?) you may be suffering from overeating. Too much fertilizer is rarely a good thing.
• Dead Feed: Sometimes, you’ll need to pull a feed out of subscription because it’s never updated. Take it out of rotation and the task of feed reading won’t seem so heavy.
• Signal vs. Noise: Is the feed providing your valuable, relevant or unique content? If not you’re going to end up skipping it soon – so just cut it.

By pruning your RSS feeds, you’ll be allowing light into the inside branches of your brain. Proper pruning allows for your feed reading to blossom to full potential.

Photo on Flickr by Memnot

Picture this – You get an important phone call from someone you do business with. They’re excited, something about a new deal:

You: Hi, This is Buddy

Them: Buddy, we’ve just closed on an account and need your services something fierce. It’s with someone you’ve always wanted to work with.

You: Sounds, great.  Tell me more!

Them: If you want to know more, hang up and call me back. <Click>

That friends, is a partial phone call.  A teaser. And it wastes everyone’s time. I don’t know anyone who does it on the phone, and if they did – they probably wouldn’t do much business.

Mark Goren has an open letter to partial feed bloggers, and I agree with his list of reasons why you should offer a full feed. Mark writes:

I use a newsreader for many reasons.

It’s not like I’m using a newsreader for fun. I do have my reasons:

1. It’s easier for me to follow all my feeds.
2. It saves me time from visiting all 152 sites that I follow.
3. It helps me stay organized/on top of things.
4. It makes it easier to scan posts.
5. It helps me learn more and become exposed to new information.

Mark offers more proof in his post and even points to a few feeds he’s put on notice that he may unsubscribe soon without full feeds being published (my list is below in a future post).

I’ll add one to Mark’s list if I may

6.  I’m more likely to comment if I’ve read the whole post in my feed aggregator. Why would I comment on a post I don’t read (and I rarely click-through on a partial feed).

Here’s the thing: If you’re offering a partial feed to drive people back to your site, that’s a clear message you care more about you than your reader (and a great big hint that you’re about to try to sell us something). Try to justify partial feeds all you want – my perspective is that partial feeds is a selfish move.

And no…Buddy didn’t return that phone call above.

TechBrew and FeedBurner are teaming up on a contest where fans of FeedBurner can win a TotalStatsPro account. Frankly, I use TotalStatsPro on every account I create – but I still may enter just for fun. The details:

The Contest

To enter the contest, submit one of the following as a comment on at this TechBrew post:

• A) A real-life photograph of the FeedBurner logo that you’ve made somehow. Tattoos, pumpkin carvings, sand castles, sky writing, whatever. The photo needs to be au natural – no photochopping, please. The submission should briefly describe what you did and include a link to the photo. Creativity is a must, humor is a bonus. Magnetic LED displays in Boston are probably a bad idea, and our lawyers ask that you don’t do anything illegal.

OR

• B) The opening sentence to what would be a really bad pulp fiction novel, somehow encorporating RSS, Atom, feeds, blogging, or FeedBurner. You know, “It was a dark and stormy night…” kind of stuff. For inspiration, read winners of the Bulwer-Lytton parody contest, but don’t forget to work in something about blogging or feeds. (At last a contest where bloggers actually get rewarded for bad writing!) The more obnoxious, the better.

The rules, deadline and submission info can be found at TechBrew

I’ve seen the look of fright painted on the faces of people clicking on RSS links. It’s not pretty. They hesitate from then on – IF they try it again.

One of our mantras is Search Once and Subscribe. We even offer hints on How to Subscribe to Feeds and Getting Started Reading Feeds. But until we can stop showing the code beneath the link – I’m not sure it’s going to hit a tipping point.

Google News Search – American Idol. Here’s what I get beneath the RSS Link:

YIKES!  Who wants to try that again?

Technorati offers up similar hyroglyphics in a blog search for Idol posts. Topix.net does a nice job of making the feed legible on a search for items about the show.

Quick tip (and a note to my web developer friends): If the feed link on your blog brings up code, go directly to FeedBurner and publish your feed there. You come up with a nice page like this one. Isn’t that better?

Photo on Flickr by eternal_exemption

Is there a tool that combines multiple (full) RSS feeds into one?

I’m working on a project where we’re taking a group blog and splitting it into three individual blogs. We want readers to be able to subscribe to the individual feeds, but also have the option of subscribing to all three in one feed (after we burn the new feed into FeedBurner).

I’ve tried Frankenfeed, FeedShake, FeedBlendr, FeedDigest, KickRSS…    They work fine for blending the feeds, but only partial feeds is the result.  Research shows that FeedBurner doesn’t provide this yet (am I wrong?)

If you know of anything (not a river of news – just the feed, ma’am), let me know. Thanks for your help.

Is it me, or can I hear Bubba in that paragraph above: "FeedKabob, FeedStew, Fried Feed, Pickled Feed…"

The other day, I went grocery shopping with my wife. When we go together, we usually split up with an In-and-Out strategy.

We’re trying to eat healthier, so this time we shopped together, starting in the produce section. So many choices, where does one begin? Some sprouts? They’re healthy. Spinach? I love it, but Cindy can’t stand it. Peppers? Cook ‘em for me. Slice ‘em and chew ‘em for Cindy. A little bit of everything? Sure, let’s get the new year started right.

We had a half-full basket — and hadn’t even made it out of the produce section. Yikes!  Too many choices. I’m on Food Overload already. What to do, what to do…

Delete some items from the food basket. After all, we know where to get each item when we’re hungry for it, right?  It’s not like we can eat it all at once – and if we did, we’d get sick.

What’s the difference between Food Overload and Feed Overload? Well, the items in your feed aggregator don’t have an expiration date. You can sense what each post is like by its headline (hopefully). If you’ve bitten off more feed than you can chew:

• Delete some items from the feed aggregator: If I haven’t read something a feed in over a week, I usually delete it.
• Don’t read all your feeds at one sitting: This will surely cause indigestion of the brain. Save room for tomorrow.
• Combine your feeds into one big feed stew: This is what Kate did with her feeds, using FeedBlendr, which I’ve also used with success.
• Order Out from Megite: Let Megite take your reading list and turn it into ‘river of news’ for you. Here’s one they put together for me, using one of my OPML reading lists.

If you reach information overload, step away from the table and survey what’s on your plate.  We don’t buy one of everything in the store. Nor should we read every item that gets published.

Do you have a well-balanced diet of feed intake? Share your secret to staying trim.

Photo on Flickr by dmmaus

Rich Brooks at Flyte Media has done a great job making a visual tutorial on How to Subscribe to a Feed which I found at Maine Today.

For those who haven’t read my post on this subject – go watch the movie…then share it with your colleagues.

This morning, a local business person sat with me to learn the why-for and how-to read feeds. I like it when I see that light bulb going on in their eyes. He’s excited. So am I.

Knowledge is Power. Time is Money. By subscribing to feeds, you know more in less time.

Want to practice subscribing to a feed? Do what I did – subscribe to Flyte Media’s Blog.