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It's MY Feed, Stupid

One of my favorite AVC posts was "It's the feed, stupid".

It was written in May 2004, after I had that "aha moment" about RSS feeds.

Since then, I've spent a lot of time using RSS, thinking about RSS, and meeting interesting companies that use RSS in some really important ways.

One thing I've come to understand acutely is the sense of ownership that publishers have of their RSS feeds.

I have done a fair amount of due diligence with large and small publishers in the process of looking at various companies. And the thing I have heard loudest is that publishers understand that RSS is a new channel to their audiences and they want to control it as much as possible.

I feel the same way.  Whether its an RSS feed of my blog at Typepad, a podcast feed of Positively 10th Street, or an RSS feed of my delicious account, I want to control how its used, how its measured, and how its monetized.

All three of these feeds are simple RSS feeds with very little done to them to make them useful to me.

But that's OK, because I have the right to do things with these feeds.  In each case, I've "burnt" these feeds at Feedburner.  The reason I do that is I get some really great stats at Feedburner and I have the option of running Google and Overture text ads in my feeds with Feedburner.  And when I publish the availability of these feeds, I point readers to the feedburner feed by actively publicizing the Feedburner feeds and "depublicizing" the simple feeds.

Depublicizing the simple feeds is tricky and not entirely achievable.  One thing I highly recommend (and just got around to doing myself) is changing the autodiscovery code in the typepad templates to whatever feeds you want to publicize.  Here's some instructions on how to do that.

If you don't do that, you'll end up like me, supporting three basic blog feeds.  I have roughly 4500 subs to my feeds in total, with about a third each for the .rdf feed at Typepad, the atom feed at Typepad, and the feedburner feed.  That's a mess.

So, that leads me to my final point.  The service providers who we use to do all of this feed stuff need to recognize that if we create the content, then we should be able to control the feed.  Because its MY feed.

Feedburner showed last week that they get this fact.  They rolled out a "redirect" service for publishers who want to leave Feedburner.  Helping customers leave a service is a "we company" move if I've ever seen one and these guys get huge credibility with me and surely everyone else for doing this.

I'll end this post with a shoutout to Six Apart/Typepad to do the same.  Please provide your users with a "redirect" service so that if we've built sizable audiences for our Tyepad feeds, we can redirect them to Feedburner or anyone else we choose.  And please do it soon.  Because its MY feed.

  Posted in Venture Capital and Technology
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Comments

This is a great post, and I'm happy to see someone saying it out loud..."It's My Feed!"

Supporting re-direction of feeds for those leaving their service was a very smart move on Feedburner's part, and I'm sure it will net them quite a few more feeds : )

My wife has been fighting stage IV cancer for the last three years and I write about it quite a bit on my blog...it is incredibly important to me that I maintain SOME semblance of control over what I write (it's too freakin' personal, otherwise) but I DO want people to be able to subscribe, too!

If a feed is a re-publication of your content, then you should be able to control it in the same way you do your own blog.

Posted by: Cary | June 13, 2005 at 04:51 PM

Here's a quick question Fred. I get your feed through NewsGator, and when I search for "A VC" I get SEVEN different matches, all leading to your blog. Probably one is the Feedburner feed, one is the Typepad, one is the third one you mentioned, I have no clue what the other four are, but I have no way of telling which one is actually the Feedburner feed. That's probably good for transparency's sake, but bad if you are trying to standardize on one feed. Probably helps to explain why your subscribers are so spread out though - we all clicked on different links!

Posted by: Steve | June 14, 2005 at 11:40 AM

Honestly, my advice is to never ever publicize a feed URL which points to a third party. Not a good long term strategy. Instead, what you want to do is keep your feed(s) at avc.blogs.com and use a transparent method to pull the actual files from Feedburner. This way, you get all the benefits of Feedburner but your URLs are still yours.

This way, if another company came along and one-upped Feedburner in the features department, you could switch to that service in two seconds, without having to notify your readers of the change.

Lock-in = Bad

Posted by: Mike D. | June 14, 2005 at 06:48 PM

Hello

I have dealt with this issue before and I am using a very simple redirect mod that basically let's me keep my URL as domain.com/index.xml and redirect it in anyway I want. Right now my index.xml points to FeedBurner, which reads my feed from a different file on my server. So if I ever want to leave feedburner subscribers don't have to do anything. I just erase or modify the redirect mod to a different file.

regards,
Leo
logsense.com

Posted by: Leo F | June 18, 2005 at 11:21 PM

Fred, I noticed that when I click "Subscribe to A VC" I don't get very far.

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