According to Compete.com, the Techmeme.com traffic rose 900% from June to July. Alexa doesn't indicate the same growth, but the validity of its results has been criticized many times before. Gabe Rivera, the developer of Techmeme, uses secret algorithms to organize his feeds into an orderly fashion. It allowed him to turn his blog into a main influence tool in the tech blogosphere.
The Techmeme model shows how - with a little programming skills - RSS feeds can be turned into a powerful source of information. I use the feeds from different influential tech blogs and use them in a widget on a professional blog. Now RSS tools are still pretty lame. Google Reader lacks the ability to re-use the feeds gathered (same for NewsGator. The secret of Rivera's algorithms might just be the next best thing for news blogs.
The actual RSS model allows readers to gather their best sources of information in one reader that they can display on their iGoogle homepage, or any personalized page. Most of the time, it is for individual use. Now you can display a RSS widget on your blog, but there's two limits: Whether you don't control the feeds displaid (you don't chose them), whether you have to manually select on your reader the items you want to share.
Since their acquisition by Google, Feedburner have developed an advertising model (pubvertise) with RSS strings. This confirms that feeds have an extremely high informational value. Its penetration ability makes it one of the trendiest, top advertising tool to keep an eye on. Therefore, when a feed provider lets you display a widget on your blog, but you don't chose the content, it's like putting up an Adwords block for free. RSS reader companies argue that it is a way to offer a more diverse and up-to-date content to your readers.
Well I say controlling feeds on your displayed widget in an automated way will be the next best thing. The poor option of selecting a category of feeds to be displayed serves only the greater good of RSS reader Websites and their partnerships with news media. This is the Web, damn it! If Gabe figured it out, why is Google keeping this technology away from us.
The widget above is an example of manually re-distributed feeds. The good side is that I get to review all the news from those sites, which is slowly turning me into a tech freak. The bad news is that I need to display more than 10 different widgets like this one on the same blog. Meaning 10 different categories. Another problem shows: I need ten different reader subscription to get ten different shared items files to get ten different widgets for ten different contextualized pages.
FeedFeeds is not too far from the truth, but the features are really basic (as the site design), you only get only widget with different tabs from your different feed categories, and you got to pay $5/month.
Now that sucks big times. A few smart algorithms from Google (or Newsgator, or anybody) could save me a lot of time and my company a lot of money. By empowering users with a customizable feed widget, RSS feed companies will see the use of their product grow, and therefore negotiate more heavily with information providers.
My opinion: Google next acquisition will be in the RSS field. That's what's up!
