FeedShow

Two mistakes brings a lot of discussion about the new service Feedpass.com.

Why they are wrong:
- They make commercial use of content without any prior authorization of the original publisher.
- They have a wrong design in which anybody can claim a content and get the benefit (money) of it.

May be they should have done something like I do with FeedShow in the Revenue Sharing Program:
- No ads if the original publisher does not explicitly agree,
- Use the RemoteAds RSS extension to get the Adsense codes of the publisher.

FeedPass.com will surely be modified to address these issues…

Discussed here:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/05/21/feedpass-does-absolutely-nothing/
http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/05/19/feedpass-makes-rss-subscription-and-monetizing-other-peoples-co/

FeedShow already provides a way to subscribe to the revenue sharing program via the RemoteAds RSS extension module.
This method is may be to complex for some users that don’t have direct access to their RSS file structure.

This is why an another method has been implemented.
This 3 steps method is really fast and easy.

First you need a Google Adsense account. If you don’t have one, you can subscribe here :

(Note that you don’t have to include ads on your blog if you don’t want to. You can use this account only with FeedShow…)

Then, you only need to publish a post that includes the following lines:

--[Subscribe FEEDSHOW Revenue sharing program]
provider=[Google]
uid=[pub-8635701842554873]
option=[5338430085]
--[Subscribe FEEDSHOW Revenue sharing program]

Just replace the ‘uid’ with your ‘google_ad_client’. Option is ‘optional’ (!) and may be set to a ‘google_ad_channel’ (do not change provider=[Google]).

The last step is to tell FeedShow to take your post into account. You will do it on this page.

You are now ready to get your share (50%) of the revenues made by your content. You can check at this feed to see how ads look like within FeedShow RSS reader.

You can now ping FeedShow when a new post is available in your blog.

Most blogging tools include an option to ping external services such as Feedshow.
Simply add the FeedShow ping url in your tool:

http://rpc.feedshow.com/ping

This will make your blog modifications show up more quickly in Feedshow.

Note that only XML-RPC interface is available.
Please refer to specifications for more details.
FeedShow supports both “weblogUpdates.ping” and “weblogUpdates.extendedPing” methods.

Update 07/05:
The list of the latest ping received is available at this address:
http://rpc.feedshow.com/show_latest_pings

The Google toobar (for Firefox) has a new feature for RSS aggregators:

You can now subscribe to your favorite web pages with just one click. Many different websites publish feeds with the latest updates to their sites so that, instead of visiting a website over and over for the latest news, you can use a feed reader to keep track of updates for you. The Toolbar will automatically detect if content of the page you are browsing is available for subscription and enable the “Subscribe” button to notify you. When enabled, simply click “Subscribe” and you’ll be taken to your chosen feed reader to confirm the subscription.

Unfortunately only a few aggregators are listed by default. FeedShow is not listed by default, however you can replace one that is listed by the one you want.

Just follow these steps:

• In your browser, go to this page: about:config
• Locate the “google.toolbar.subscribe.aggregators” options
• Double-click “google.toolbar.subscribe.aggregators.iGoogle.title” and modify its value with:
  “FeedShow”
• Double-click “google.toolbar.subscribe.aggregators.iGoogle.url’ and replace the value with:
  http://www.feedshow.com/add_subscriptions.php?action=feed_entry&feed_url=%feed%

Now restart your browser (optional ?) and set your preferences to use FeedShow RSS reader. You are now ready to use FeedShow from the Google toolbar.

Note that the toolbar seems to get the available aggregators from a file:
http://google.com/tools/firefox/toolbar/FT2/intl/en/aggregators.xml
The method described above is just a little hack to get FeedShow in the list.

You certainly have a lot of RSS feeds in your aggregator. Among those some are not active anymore but are sometimes hard to detect.
To help you purge your blogroll, Feedshow has a new feature: the “statistics” page.
On this page you can sort all of your feeds on various criteria such as the date of last update or the refresh rate.

Thanks to this new feature your blogroll will now be clean and only contain useful feeds.

When reading podcasts, Feedshow now uses a new player. The source is available for this one and it is delivered with a convenient (CC) license as well.

Try it here !

FeedShow receives a new feature: RSS Feeds Search.

The search engine supports “full text” search (like common engines such as Google). Only “title”, “description” and “links” are taken into account while searching (not the whole feed content).

Searching all RSS feeds at the “NY Times”: Search “nytimes“.

Improvements are still in progress to obtain more relevant results. Soon language filter will also be available.

When a feed has not changed since the last fetch, a server can answer the request with a “304 HTTP code”. Not all servers have this feature enabled, and the result is bandwidth loss.
Here’s a good idea from Scott (Feedlounge). Servers that are “304 enabled” will have their feeds refreshed faster than the others.

Geof F. Morris also listed some reasons why this should be implemented.

I like this idea and will implement it in FeedShow crawler. Crawling the feeds 5 (or more ?) times faster than the others is something that should make the webmasters think about “conditional GET” support.

The RSS feeds list on the left panel is once again faster than it was.
Some preprocessing has been added and FeedShow is now very comfortable even with a large number of feeds configuration (500 feeds is considered a large number !)
Other improvements are on the way…
Tags : Feedshow Aggregator

FeedShow forums are now opened. Blogs are great but can’t satisfy all needs. These forums should help to track all of your questions, all your needs or anything you want to say about FeedShow.

I will try to improve this PunBB software and add a trackback feature so that you will be able to reach this forum from your blogs (may be some of you know about a “plugin” that can do the job) !

I will try to answer all questions or request. Don’t hesitate, just tell me you think about FeedShow.