Newly Corporate

RSS feeds are widely used by Gen Yers (or any generation for that matter), to distribute their content as bloggers (like our feed), to digest content through readers like Google Reader or in a myriad of other web 2.0 contexts. As RSS technology continues to standardize syndication on the internet, many companies have capitalized on it by enabling monitoring, reformatting and other customized RSS modifications to allow people to feed just about anything and monitor their readers habits to better serve their audience.

What is FeedBurner?

FeedBurner is by far the most successful and widely used RSS feed manager. They allow everything from the social features on the bottom of our posts (digg it) to the statistics backend that we use to see which items are most popular. They ensure our feed stays properly formatted and compliant with all readers so you can subscribe with anything. The point is, FeedBurner will do anything you can imagine with a blog feed, and now they are stepping it up to a whole new level.

Feedburner Networks…?

Enter, FeedBurner Networks, a service that allows you to form networks of blogs that produce similar content or merely would like to join forces. Here is how the FeedBurner Networks FAQ discribes the new beta service:

What are FeedBurner Networks?

FeedBurner Networks is a service (currently in beta), that encourages discoverability and self-promotion of your feed content.

Why was this service created?

While we’d like to think we’re pretty organized and we know your feeds pretty well, we talked it over amongst ourselves and decided that the collective “you” are much better equipped to assemble yourselves into groups or “networks” of feed producers who publish similar content. We also think it’s your right to do so. FeedBurner Networks is our way of facilitating this self-organizing process.

What will FeedBurner Networks help publishers do that they can’t already do today?

FeedBurner Networks empowers publishers to create their own communities. This kind of freedom to organize can be a powerful way for publishers to leverage the power of many to increase their reach online, attract more subscribers and potentially more advertising opportunities, if they so choose.

How you can I use FeedBurner Networks?

I recently got an invite to an existing network and then started creating networks of my own. I know, you’re saying, “this is all blogging stuff Brandon, give me something I can use”. One of it’s best, and most uncommon uses is as a uber-aggregator. I used to use xFruits.com to aggregate feeds into a single feed so that I could insert them into a widget or use them in other ways but, xFruits.com is unreliable, shortens feeds and is slow to update. Not to mention it doesn’t allow all the social features or the nicely formatted homepage for the “network” or aggregated feed.

At work, I recently used it to aggregate the shared items of a number of co-workers so we could instantly share relevant news with each other and others inside the company via a website, email or RSS. You could do this with anything, photostreams, social network feeds from given groups of friends, or all of your personal feeds (shoot, if your famous you can slap an ad on the bottom of all the Flickr, Seesmic, Facebook, Twitter, blog and other updates that flow through your personal network).

Feed aggregation is nothing new but, allowing groups of bloggers or an individuals with a number of feeds to quickly meld feeds, track their statistics and even sell advertising is a serious step forward for FeedBurner and RSS management in general. Let’s hope FeedBurner releases this service to the public in short order.