Steve Olechowski is the cofounder and COO of FeedBurner. During his CarsonWorkshops The Future of Web Apps session he some insight into RSS feeds. I didn’t record all the ten things about RSS that I didn’t know, because what you don’t know wont hurt you and because they seemed unimportant for someone not working at FeedBurner.
One thing that I have been playing with is how much text should I display in my RSS feeds. I used to display the whole enchilada but then limited to the summary for each post. According to Steve, the most text you display on a RSS feed the more traffic will click through to your site. Steve admits this seems counterintuitive. In addition to more traffic, the more text you display on a your RSS feed the more people will subscribe to your feed, this is intuitive.
Another thing I didn’t know but that Steve shed light on is that podcasts are more evenly distributed across topics, sectors, categories than text blog feeds. I also didn’t know that 7% of RSS click through are made by bots. The last fact from Steve’s talk that I took notice was that RSS feeds is that they are being read on mobile phones.
Technorati Tags: feedburner, rss, feed, feeds, fowa
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