Which Feedreader Do You Use?

RSS feeds make it possible for a webmaster to ensure that followers of a particular website can keep up with the site’s updates. Going from website to blog to news site becomes cumbersome when you have a lot of them bookmarked; being able to gather them in a feedreader makes much more sense.

Hitwise analyst LeeAnn Prescott discussed what the numbers look like for users of web-based feed readers, and found that Bloglines easily led a group of five she examined.

Prescott’s analysis does not take portal-based options like My Yahoo, or client-side software like Newsgator’s NetNewsWire, into account here. Web-based feedreaders offer the utility of being available anywhere an Internet connection can be tapped.

Those sites focus on the feedreading experience entirely. New implementations and features have to benefit that experience, lest the site lose users to competing destinations.

Bloglines topped the list in terms of market share of US visits. It has triple the market share of visits to Rojo, which combines elements of social media with its feedreading capabilities.

Google Reader has languished in terms of traffic, and that has been a common affliction for Google’s services beyond search. Prescott noted Google Reader has seen recent growth, but for the week ended January 13th it had one-thirteenth of Bloglines’ market share.

But people still have website visits ingrained as a habit. Prescott looked at the market share of web visits for a trio of popular destinations: Perez Hilton, Huffington Post, and Engadget. Their shares easily dwarfed those of the online feedreaders, leading Prescott to make a couple of conclusions:

Bloglines and Google Reader both have mobile capabilities, extending their usefulness and availability beyond the typical desktop setup. As more people find the pressing need to have information at their fingertips from as many sources as possible, we think the mobile side of feedreading should gain in importance.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

If you’re just looking for some basic blog terminology so you can feel like you’re “part of it,” then read on. If you’re looking for something a bit more advanced, check back in a few days for more advanced blog terminology.

Here are some important terms to know and why they are important to you. Even if it’s just to impress your nerd friend with terms like moblogging and other blargon.

Blog: Essentially a contraction of the words web log, or the word weblog, whichever you prefer. Blogs are coming to mean different things to different people, but basically a blog is a way to push content (usually chronologically) on a page, much like a journal.

Aggregator: An aggregator can help you to read content from blogs without having to go to the actual page. It is a piece of software that combines excerpts or updates from blogs so you can read them on your computer or browser without going to the original site. Below are some sites from which you can download aggregators (some for your computer, some for your browser). It is also useful to know that some other terms that refer to the same basic definition of an aggregator. These other terms include feed reader, feed aggregator, news reader, news aggregator and RSS aggregator and reader.

Desktop:
Feed Reader
News Gator (FeedDemon)

Browser:
Bloglines
Rojo
RSS Reader

Blogger: This term can be used two different ways. It can mean any person who publishes content to a blog or it can refer to Google’s hosted blog service, Blogger. When referring to Google’s Blogger site, the “B” is usually capitalized; when talking about someone who posts content to a blog, the “b” is not necessarily capitalized.

Blogosphere: Generally, this encompasses all the blogs (commercial, personal, etc.) in the blogging community.

Blogroll: This refers to a list of links to other blogs that the author(s) of a blog also read regularly. The blogroll is usually located on the sidebar on the blog page. So if you like what you are reading, you mightwant to check out some other blogs that might also interest you and “blogroll” them.

Permalink: This is another contraction from the term permanent link.Essentially it is a way to keep a URL for a particular blog entry or post.

Post: This is any published content on a blog. A blog is comprised of individual posts that are arranged in chronological order, usually with the most recent on top.

Comment: This allows people who are reading the blog to comment on the author’s opinion or offer supplemental information or anything else related to the post they wish to have published in the comments section (below the post). Feel free to comment on this post with any relevant information or anything you would like to see here that you can’t find.

Ping: This is a notice that goes out when a blog is updated. When blogs are updated they “ping” certain sites and services letting them know that their blog is updated. Tag: This is a label assigned to a blog entry to categorize or help define its content. The use of tags was initiated by Technorati and they use tags to organize blogs in their system. These terms are basic terms that users and novice bloggers should be familiar with so they can talk intelligently about what they do and understand what others are saying. If you’re looking for some more detailed blog terminology, I will be putting up additional terms as well as resources for sprucing up and optimizing your blog.

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About the Author

Geoff is based in LA and has experience in Public Relations and New Business Development for companies such as SS|PR, Grey Direct West, Acclivity Inc. and others. He is currently the LA sales manager for Social Media Systems online marketing company and co-authors the 3net Search Engine Marketing Blog.

Each week, the Technorati Buzz Monitor will drop into inboxes on Fridays. Here is the company’s description of the publication:

We have seen Rojo send out something like this for a few months now.

The top stories seen on the site get collected on the Rojo blog, and that entry also whooshes out to Rojo’s users by email.

Technorati’s launch (actually a relaunch after a year’s hiatus) of their weekly newsletter did not go off as smoothly as founder Dave Sifry anticipated.

He discussed the mailing announcement on the Technorati blog:

The bad link leads directly to a user’s Technorati profile, instead of to a third party provider of services that would handle the unsubscribe in a very direct fashion.

“That wasn’t well thought out, and I apologize,” Sifry wrote.

Apparently some found the prospect of logging in to their Technorati profile and unchecking the option to receive the newsletter a distasteful one and made their displeasure known.

Going to the profile signing page could have proven inconvenient to those who had forgotten their usernames or passwords for those profiles.

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Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but our assumption was that this a less than $5 million deal. Six Apart is not planning on continuing to build out the core Rojo products. In the press release (sorry no link available yet), Six Apart says “Six Apart intends to sell a majority interest in Rojo’s newsreader services in the coming months,” meaning they will become a minority stockholder of the service. Rojo founder and CEO Chris Alden and CTO Aaron Emigh will joing Six Apart’s executive team.

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Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.

According to Liz Gannes at GigaOM, Rojo was struggling to raise funding and attract an online audience. In May, the online feed reader was pulling in only 100,000 visitors per month.

It appears though, that the technology and the talent behind it were of unique interest to SixApart. Rojo.com will stay online, according SixApart CEO Barak Berkowitz, who also plans to use Rojo code in other products.
Berkowitz will be taking on Rojo senior executives Chris Alden and Aaron Emigh at the company as executive vice president and general manager of Movable Type, and executive vice president and general manager of core technologies, respectively.

You may know both new SixApart executives from other venues. Alden is cofounder and CEO of Red Herring Communications, while Emigh was formerly the CEO of CommerceFlow.

“We are very pleased that Chris and Aaron are joining us,” said Berkowitz. “They bring outstanding experience and knowledge that will benefit all of our users, including the millions of those using TypePad, LiveJournal and Vox.”

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I have been playing with one of these, Rojo, a lot in the past few weeks. It’s quite good. Rojo needs a mobile version and the ability to sync and it would be a killer RSS reader. These essential features for now are keeping me with Newsgator.

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Steve Rubel is a PR strategist with nearly 16 years of public relations, marketing, journalism and communications experience. He currently serves as a Senior Vice President with Edelman, the largest independent global PR firm.

He authors the Micro Persuasion weblog, which tracks how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the public relations practice.

“Syndication is undoubtedly the heartbeat of the web 2.0 movement,” Gruber began by way of introduction for his substantial post on TechCrunch about online feed readers. A feed reader does the heavy lifting for a user, by scouring sites and collecting all the new items in feeds in the reader.

Gruber did not include MyYahoo in his assessment, though he called it the “most widely used web-based reader.” Online virtual desktops and portals like NetVibes and Live.com also did not fall under his purview. Nine purely online feed readers did, as listed here:

•  Attensa Online
•  Bloglines
•  FeedLounge
•  Google Reader
•  Gritwire
•  News Alloy
•  NewsGator Online
•  Pluck Web Edition
•  Rojo

Gruber found Google Reader and FeedLounge had the fastest average times per feed when loading five feeds. He gave Rojo credit for its “Mojo” system where users can rate the items being displayed. Rojo and Gritwire received special mention for their contacts features, which allow for the “social aspect” of sharing information of interest with others.

Pluck’s FeedFinder and Rojo’s recommendations feature offer users the chance to discover new feeds of interest.

Ultimately, Gruber acknowledged that out of this admittedly small slice of the online feed reader market, FeedLounge and Google Reader won out on performance, while Bloglines and Rojo offered the broadest feature sets.

A chart he created comparing several features among the readers will be a living document, which he plans to update depending on added information about these feed readers. But none of them managed to outperform “the speed and agility of the best desktop based readers like NetNewsWire and FeedDemon,” Gruber wrote.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

I will have to give it a spin. Lately I find myself using Bloglines for blog feeds because it caches all posts and My Yahoo for regular news feeds.

Added by WPN Editor …

Excerpts from press announcement:

Rojo offers a new generation of feed reading service that allows people to find, read, and share information with their colleagues and friends in an organized and meaningful way. “Our goal with Rojo’s community features, tags, search, link analysis, and wizard is to make the brave new world of blogs and RSS feeds accessible and appealing to technophiles and new consumers alike,” said Chris Alden.

“Rojo is wrapping a communications capability around content consumption,” said blogger and World Wide Web pioneer Marc Andreessen, an investor in Rojo Networks. “And the killer app for the Internet is and always has been communication.”

Rojo has pioneered the following features:

1. Social network for content. Rojo’s community features allow users to
   share stories, feeds, tags, contacts, and profile information with
   their contacts, which makes it easy to find, discover, and share
   interesting content.
2. Contact management. Rojo lets users store an address book of their
   contacts so they can easily email stories to people.
3. Tags. Rojo uses tags instead of folders to organize feeds, stories
   within feeds, and contacts. Tags, or user-selected keywords, are an
   innovative way to categorize and share information.
4. Attention. Rojo learns from users’ reading behavior by paying
   attention to what they focus on.
5. Popular Link Analysis (the RojoBuzz). Rojo tracks which webpages are
   most linked-to by the feeds a user reads.
6. Getting Started Wizard. Rojo helps users discover and add feeds with
   an easy-to-use feed wizard.

Steve Rubel is a PR strategist with nearly 16 years of public relations, marketing, journalism and communications experience. He currently serves as a Senior Vice President with Edelman, the largest independent global PR firm.

He authors the Micro Persuasion weblog, which tracks how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the public relations practice.

The site, now in preview, will compete with Bloglines and Rojo. CNET’s move comes on the heels of the LA Times and Guardian, which launched desktop RSS readers last week. This is the beginning of a trend where the big media launch branded RSS aggregators to make sure they retain reader loyalty.

The copy on the CNET Newsburst preview site reads…

Newsburst is a personalized tool that tracks virtually any type of information on the Web: news, blogs, shopping lists, weather, search results, alerts, auctions and more.

Information is everywhere, and Newsburst lets you access it from one place. Read differently.

Here’s a screen grab from the site…

Steve Rubel is a PR strategist with nearly 16 years of public relations, marketing, journalism and communications experience. He currently serves as a Senior Vice President with Edelman, the largest independent global PR firm.

He authors the Micro Persuasion weblog, which tracks how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the public relations practice.