Blogs and Feeds - What you should know

I spent the morning at PubCon today (after the keynote by Guy) learning about Blogs and Feeds and how to optimize them.  As you know, this blog is fairly new and I feel strongly that blogging is the future of the Internet.  I almost think of this site as a learning opportunity for helping my clients to take advantage of the full benefits of blogging.

The first session on this subject was “Feeds, Blogs, News, and Social Search”.  I’ll try to just give the highlights and action points on this posting.

Niall Kennedy used to work for Technorati.  He gave some basic comments on feeds and blogging.  Some good ideas included:

• Be sure to subscribe to your own feed using My Yahoo, Google Reader, and Bloglines.
• Claim your feed by creating a Google Sitemap, Yahoo Sitemap, and a feed of some sort for Technorati.  (I need to do this, so I’m not real familiar with the Technorati one.)
• Validate your feed at FeedValidator.org.
• When you publish, be sure to ping Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Bloglines, NewsGator, and Technorati.

Rick Klau is the VP of FeedBurner.  He noted that there are 45K radio stations in the world, but they monitor 70K podcasts.  Pretty amazing.  He mentioned checking out blog search engines such as Sphere.  It’s important to submit to blog search engines.  (NOTE:  I sat next to a guy that is running a site called Blog Digger also.  It seems like another decent blog search engine.)  He also noted that IE 7.0 and Firefox 2 now have a method of viewing feeds.  This means the future of feeds is about to take off. 

Owen Bryne is the cofounder of Digg.com.  He showed how in just a few years, Digg has taken off.  Digg is a website that allows people to “submit a page” and “vote for” that page.  Therefore, the most popular posts end up on the home page of Digg.  Go visit the site and you will understand it pretty quickly. 

NOTE:  Getting on the top page of Digg is not easy, but will generate tremendous traffic.  Therefore, everyone wants to be there.  But how?  You have to have something that everyone votes for.  You are at the mercy of the public opinion.  Start by voting for it yourself and getting your friends to do so.  But it has to take off on its own after that.

Chris Tolles is the VP of Marketing at Topix.net.  Topix launched in 2004 and they take 25,000 blogs and try to categorize all of them.  Fresh content tends to rank well.  He encourages writing content, but even more importantly, getting people to add content to your site.  He also encourages commenting on local matters.  They have technical ways to semantically determine what locality a page is about.  This means it’s a good idea to mention local places, zip codes, and area codes on your site from time to time.

Good session.  Good points to keep in mind about blogging.

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