A few months ago, we introduced a feature called Following, which lets readers publicly subscribe to your blog. Since then it’s been incredibly successful: nearly three million communities in 39 languages have followers, and every second of every day, a reader follows a blog.
But your readers come from across the web, from Yahoo, AOL, WordPress, Typepad… not just Blogger. That’s why we’re excited to announce that we’ve integrated Blogger Following with Google Friend Connect.
Friend Connect encourages readers to use one account (whether it’s a Google account, a Yahoo, AIM or OpenID account) to follow any site – a Blogger blog, a WordPress blog, or any other site that has incorporated Friend Connect. Each site that a follower joins will show up on their Friend Connect profile. Now your blog will benefit from increased exposure as your readers interact with other sites around the web – and their friends see your blog listed as one they’ve chosen to follow. (Check out how to follow a blog)
Blogs that are using the Following feature have automatically been migrated to Friend Connect, so you don’t need to do a thing. And be sure to stay tuned – over the next several months, there are a number of additional features coming to Blogger as a result of today’s Friend Connect integration.
One note for readers who previously followed one or more sites with Blogger Following and joined one or more sites with Friend Connect: you can decide whether or not to show the sites you’ve joined via Blogger Following and Google Friend Connect in your Blogger profile. By default, we have turned the “Show blogs I follow in my Blogger profile” option off. If you change your mind, here are instructions for making this list of sites public on your Blogger profile.
Update Feb. 26, 2009: For sites whose follower counts have decreased, here is an explanation that goes into more detail about the decision to make certain followers private.
Many of you have already moved from a feedburner.com account to a Google Account. For those who have not yet made the move, there seems to be some confusion on the process and exactly what will happen, or not happen, by certain dates. We want this post to help clear up any confusion.
The FeedBurner functionality of analyzing, optimizing, publicizing, and monetizing your feeds is not being shut down or reduced in any way. We have made some strategic decisions to remove some of our functionality that is not directly relevant to managing feeds for reasons we hope will become apparent over time. Names may change, things may move around, but in general our plan is to provide a lot more functionality that makes sense in 2009, and beyond, for all publishers. Learn more here.
On February 28th, if you have not moved your feeds to a Google Account, the traffic to your feeds will not be cut off or terminated, but you will not be able to view or manage your feeds until you have moved to a Google Account, unless you use MyBrand. Technically, this means that all traffic will now be served out of our Google data centers, and there will still be a way to move your account that will be in place indefinitely.
If you used MyBrand at www.feedburner.com, you absolutely must move to a Google account and update your DNS CNAME records by March 16, 2009, or else your MyBrand URLs will return a 404 error. If you use MyBrand and have not moved, you should have already received an email from us with detailed instructions. If, for some reason, you have changed the email address associated with your FeedBurner account, you will receive another message once you have finished the move process to the email address associated with your Google Account.
From a features perspective, this means the work to transition publishers to Google will be complete, and we plan to focus all of our resources on building new and exciting publisher tools that are integrated with other Google products, and to continue improving the monetization potential of AdSense for feeds. We can’t wait for you to see some of the things we have in store, but if for some reason you do not want to migrate to a Google account, you can still take your feeds with you.
Posted by Steve Olechowski and Matt Shobe, on behalf of the AdSense for Feeds/FeedBurner Team
Over the past few weeks, a number of enhancements have been made to Google’s offerings for the iPhone. We wanted to highlight some of those improvements here.
Google Sync Beta Google Sync allows you to get your Gmail Contacts and Google Calendar events to your phone. Once you set up Sync on your phone, it will automatically begin synchronizing your address book and calendar in the background, over-the-air, so you can attend to other tasks. Sync uses push technology so any changes or additions to your calendar or contacts are reflected on your device in minutes.
Tasks Tasks lets you easily create and manage to-do lists in Gmail and on your iPhone. While on the go, you can view tasks, add tasks, and mark them as completed. These changes are automatically reflected in Gmail. Using your iPhone, you can also add, edit, and delete entire lists.
Google Book Search Over 1.5 million public domain books in the US (and over half a million outside the US) are now available for perusing on your iPhone. You can search for a title, author, or subject. Or you can browse the list of “Featured books” and various categories like business, the classics, travel, and more.
Edit Docs Last week, we launched new capabilities to Google Docs for your iPhone that allow you to add new rows, edit existing cells, sort by columns, and filter by terms. Now you don’t have to wait until you get to your computer to update a spreadsheet.
Over the years we’ve heard lots of great ideas for promoting your blog, and have been compiling them here as a handy reference. From simply adding links to enabling cool newer features such as Following, we’re always happy to update the page when we stumble across something new.
Our latest addition comes from our friends at TypePad, who have put together a great video on How to add your blog feed to your Facebook profile. After trying this ourselves, we’ve found that integrating your blog feed into your Facebook profile can be a really effective way to keep your friends updated on the latest from your blog.
So if you’ve been looking for slick new ways to expand your blog’s audience, check out the video and give it a shot!
In times like these, we know that generating as much revenue as possible is on many publishers’ minds. This will be the first of many posts that will hope to explain how to better configure AdSense for feeds to help maximize revenue.
Before going into specifics though, it’s important to understand a couple important differences in how your subscribers are different from visitors on your website. If you use an analytics package for your site such as Google Analytics, most publishers will see that a large amount of their traffic comes from web searches. Many of these visitors may have been searching for a certain item, such as one of those blankets with sleeves and a hood – let’s call it a shanket. You happen to have written about how much you love your shanket, and let’s face it, you know how to write with the best of them, so your page ranks high in search results. That visitor may see an ad for a shanket next to your search result but wants to know more. So he or she clicks and reads your post, which seals the deal on this visitor needing a new shanket. You use AdSense for content, which includes ads for shankets that are matched contextually; the visitor clicks; a shanket is sold; and you earn revenue in the process.
Your feed subscribers, however, very rarely, if at all, get to your content from a web search. On the contrary, they subscribe to your blog because you write entertaining musings about your family life, and occasionally also write about some of the wonderful products you have come across, such as your shanket.
Because of this, the types of advertisers that run campaigns targeted at your feeds are not necessarily the same advertisers that are targeting search users. Instead of targeting keywords that match a search, advertisers wishing to use feed subscribers target placements in the Google Content Network.
How do you ensure that your placements are exposed effectively in the Google Content Network?
That’s the easy part. When setting up new feeds on the AdSense Setup tab, make sure you leave the box that says “Create a channel that allows advertisers to target the selected feed.” If you are creating a new channel that aggregates all of your feeds or subsets of your feeds that you would like to show to advertisers (highly recommended), make sure by selecting the “Show this channel to advertisers as an ad placement.”
In a week or so, these placements will show up in AdWords and some of the other tools used by Google advertisers to target the content network.
Stay tuned for the next installment on Advanced Feed Placement optimization.
Posted by Steve Olechowski – Product Manager, AdSense for feeds
Most people who need something just go to the store to get the item, but a number of people take the time and effort to handcraft their own stuff. They do that because they enjoy tinkering with things until they work just the way they like them. Well, Custom Search has a group of developers who are like that, and they want to create and share their tools.
For such developers, we have good news. We launched a new API that lets other services connect to Custom Search. You can programmatically create, update, and delete search engines without going through the Custom Search control panel. In fact, the API offers most of the functionality that the Custom Search platform provides, and we’re working on supporting the rest.
If you provide a service such as hosting websites or blogs, you can partner with Google to create custom search engines for your users. You can use the API to integrate Custom Search into your management console. Your users can then create search engines using your service and will need to use the Custom Search control panel only if they want to be more involved in the customization of their search engines. In our previous blog entry, we talked about how several web hosting providers have already done this. (If you are a web hosting provider who wants to integrate search into the sites you host, please ping us.)
Even if you are not providing a service for a large set of users, you could still create a lot of cool things with the API. Here are a few ideas: If you have a list of websites that change frequently, you can automate the updating of your annotations file; if you have a content management system, you could create search for all your webpages and even create search labels based on your existing categories; if you are a blogging platform, you can enable search for all your blogs.
We hope that by now you’ve found the Google Sites Help Forum to be the best place to ask questions and share tips with other Sites users. We’ve been listening to your feedback about features you’d like to see in the forum, and we’re excited to announce that we’ve upgraded the English Sites Help Forum.
Now you can more easily find the information you need by searching across the Google Sites Help Forum, Help Center, and blog. We have the same categories as the Help Center, so you can transition from one category to the other. We even have some extra things we hope you’ll really like. There is a system of levels to reward your contributions to the Forum, and the ability to add a picture next to your name in the profiles. You can also subscribe to the Forum (or to individual discussions) by RSS feed, post a question and receive your answer by email, and even vote on which response best answers the question and mark a best answer to a question you asked.
We hope you’ll come take a look, and we hope you’ll stay a while, sign into your Google Account, and ask and answer questions.
Posted by Michael Perry, Google Sites Support Lead
