It’s not even a plug-in, but simply an automatic feature, which requires no changes from bloggers. Although, those using Advance Templates in TypePad will have to add a line of code to their atom.xml, which can be found here.

Pubsubhubbub is described as a "simple, open, server-to-server web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol as an extension to Atom and RSS." This is a protocol that Google itself has adopted for shared items in Google Reader, which allows it to contribute to real-time search. Google recently provided the following presentation:

"The PubSubHubbub protocol is decentralized and free," explains Six Apart’s Nima Badiey. "No single company controls it and anybody can run a hub, ping (publish) or subscribe using open hubs."

"The new TypePad PubSubHubbub hub builds on the exciting work that Brad Fitzpatrick (a Six Apart alum) and Brett Slatkin’s team at Google have done with the implementation of PubSubHubbub," Badiey says.

A lot of blogs are hosted by TypePad, so this could prove to be another big stride for the real-time web, which we hear more and more about every day. That’s why real-time search is not limited to tweets and Facebook updates. Content in general is rapidly pushed out from many different media channels all over the web. Freshness can play a big role in some kinds of queries.

Speaking of "real-time," a way to get close to real-time search using Google has been discovered by way of tweaking a URL using a time-related search option. More on this here.

"This feature allows to you filter ads in up to five categories such as Dating, Drugs and Supplements, Weight Loss, and Get Rich Quick," says AdSense for Feeds Product Manager Steve Olechowski. "Your filters will be applied to English-language ads, no matter how they were targeted."

When a user wants these settings to take effect, they should go to the Ad Review Center, and select a Client-ID that starts with ca-feed-pub. This allows the user to select different categories for their feed than for their site. Users must also select filters for both their feed and their site for the filters to be applied to both.

Categories than can be blocked include:

- Cosmetic procedures and surgery
- Dating
- Drugs and supplements
- Get rich quick
- Politics
- Religion
- Ringtones and downloadables
- Sexual and reproductive health
- Sexually suggestive
- Video games
- Weight loss

Only up to five categories can be blocked. Google says its technology will make its "best attempt" to filter ads from the categories above, but it doesn’t guarantee that some won’t slip through.

If you go to the settings page in Google Reader, find the Send To tab. From there, you can select other services to send your shared items to. Then you can easily share content via Facebook, Twitter, Digg, etc. as you come across it in Google Reader.

Another new feature is the ability to easily subscribe to feeds from the people you follow. If you click on one of your followers, you can see the feeds they have included in their Google Profile (if any), and you can go from there. Another option is to click the "From people you follow" tab on the "Browse for stuff" page.

Another noticeable new feature in Google Reader is the addition of more options under "Mark as Read." You now get a pull-down menu, which lets you select whether you want to mark all items as read, or just the ones that are older than a day, a week, or two weeks.

In addition to these features, when you expand an item in comment view, you can now get the full set of actions (share, like, star), without leaving comment view. They’ve also added a "Feeds" start-page option for the iPhone/Android/Pre mobile interface, and an option to show notes when embedding shared items on other pages as clips.

"By changing our ad serving to the doubleclick.net domain, we are now allowing advertisers to more easily create campaigns that span all media platform types on the Google Content Network, including sites, feeds, and mobile," explains AdSense for Feeds Product Manager Steve Olechowski.

Advertisers have always been able to target feeds using Placement Targeting and Contextual Targeting. Now they will also be able to target feed users using Interest Based Advertising across both sites and feeds.

Interest Based Advertising was announced by Google in early March as a beta test for the company’s partner sites and on YouTube. It is basically serving ads based on the sites that users visit. With Interest Based Advertising, users can choose categories for ads they want to see. They can also tell Google the categories they don’t want to see ads for. From the advertiser’s perspective, this is a great targeting tool.

"By making it easier for advertisers to buy ads in your feeds, and by supporting the exact same features and ad formats that are accepted on websites, the competition for your ad space should increase to help ensure that you’re maximizing your earnings potential," says Olechowski.

On another Google advertising note, the company has launched the Ad Planner Publisher Center, which is also designed for publishers and advertisers both to maximize earnings potential.

The new functionality of Google Blog Search is not without its bugs though. One user pointed out some problems in a Google Groups post about her name drawing results based on blogs having her in their blogrolls. This attracted a response from Jeremy Hylton of the Google Blog Search Team:

We have changed the way we index blog posts to include the full content of the page.  We’ve had occasional complaints about the use of the feed content, particularly the problem with partial feeds that you mentioned.  The indexing change has improved the results for a lot of queries, both because we have the full content of the page and because we extract links that are missing from the feeds.  The downside of this change is that we see more results that match only the blogroll and other parts of the page that are common to all of a blog’s posts.

We expected some problems from blogroll matches, but may have underestimated the impact on searches using the link: operator or where the query matches a blog or blogger’s name.  We do expect to fix the problem you’re seeing.  We’ll use the full page content, but exclude the content that isn’t really part of the post.  I’m not sure if we’ll be able to make the change before the end of the year, but we are working on it and are pretty confident that it can be solved.

Barry Schwartz mentions in a comment on Vanessa Fox’s blog that he has been seeing these changes for about a month, so the changes have evidently been around for a while without attracting much attention.

How it works:

1. Enter at least one RSS Feed

2. Select Your Delivery Options

3. On schedule, they email you a print-ready PDF

Publishers that want their feeds to be compatible with Tabbloid may have to make some adjustments. When I experimented with it to see what our own WebProNews feeds looked like in it, I got the common excerpt format, and for those printing out PDFs to read paper versions, they’re not going to be able to click on "read more", so they’re not going to be able to read the full content.

Publishers that offer full content in their feeds would presumably fit right into this, though I would imagine it would use a whole lot of paper. Amit Agarwal suggests mobile uses:

You may find this very useful if your old smartphone can send & receive emails but has no built-in feed reader. Just get your favorite sites as a PDF file in your email and read the new content at leisure without your laptop.

I don’t know how often people are going to want their feeds in a PDF format, but HP making the option available can’t hurt.