Feeds, Blogs, News and Social Search Wrap-Up
Although it seemed a bit of catch-all session (and mostly named to give each presenter a nod), the Feeds, Blogs, News, and Social Search was quite informative.
Niall Kennedy presented, mostly, a basic overview of feeds, defining them for attendees who were completely new to the world of feeds. The depth in which he covered the topic however, was impressive. I think Brett would do well by having Niall kick off any presentation on feeds/content syndication.
There were a few gems (for me) from his presentation. First, a helpful code snippet for linking to alternate language versions of the same document. This code can be read by search engine spiders and by some browsers (like Firefox).
Place in the <head> of the document:
<link title="Arabic" href="http://ar.example.com/" rel="alternate" hreflang="ar" type="text/html" />
Niall reminded the attendees the branding value of including a logo in your feed and the importance of validating your feed using a service like feedvalidator.org or installing a feed validator locally. He provided a list of sites to which you should publish/ping but personally I think ping-o-matic does the trick for everything.
Don't forget to subscribe to your own feed in the major online feed readers out there including My Yahoo!, Google Reader, and Bloglines. Take advantage of any tagging/categorization/rating features of those services to flesh out your own feed.
Niall also made a point of discouraging the creation of new tags, attributes, and categories for your feed. Take advantage of existing standards and extended vocabularies as that increases the chance of broad support in the various readers and aggregators.
Nick Klau, VP of Business Development over at Feedburner gave a presentation on trends they are seeing at feedburner and their own impressive growth.
One of the first, and most important points he makes, is that it is vital to feed owners to make sure that their feeds can be auto-discovered in all the major browsers. IE7 and Firefox 2 (ahem, and Safari) all have built-in readers so it's also important to check your feed in all those apps.
When considering using a third party to host your feed, you should map a subdomain (like feeds.example.com) so that you can retain control over your feed hosting. Although you might expect a feedburner representative to suggest otherwise, Rick made it clear that they do not have any intention of locking in users to their service and they believe firmly that publishers should maintain control regardless of which service they choose.
Owen Byrne, co-founder of Digg, spoke about the state of Digg and a little of their history.
Some of the scalability lessons he has learned with Digg are invaluable and reveal his software engineer background:
- Avoid premature optimization
Get the code out there then see what needs to be optimized - Cache, cache, and more cache
I take this to mean that they do a lot of writing to disk instead of hammering the database for every single page load. He also mentioned memcached in this context - Hardware is cheap, downtime is not
Normally this argument goes "Hardware is cheap, developers are expensive" but I prefer the opportunity cost as a comparison against downtime. :) - Lots of servers - spare, monitoring, testing, developing
He said (if I recall correctly, I didn't make a note of this) that Digg has something like 90 servers but that many of those are spares or development mirrors of the production servers.
Chris Tolles, VP of marketing at topix.net gave some background about his work at the ODP and motivations in building an algorithmically edited news aggregator.
Topix.net provides over 50,000 feeds and ranks very well for locality + "news" searches. Chris believes it is the "freshness" of their content. Specifically that, even though they are republishing other sites content, they are doing it so quickly and frequently that the search engines love it.
Topix saw somewhat of a stagnation in growth. In response to this stagnation they added a message board for every news item and locality. You can see a U.S. map of forum activity on topix.net here (broken in Safari, use Firefox).
On the subject of getting feed readers, aggregators and search engines to recognize updated content correctly, Chris recommends the appropriate use of the <ins> and <del> tags to mark changes.
Finally, some of the "value added" by topix.net is simply that they are categorizing the content of others. This small bit of difference makes it possible for them to rank as well or better than the original content.
Added: Chris Tolles was written a great article comparing and contrasting Web 2.0 and WebmasterWorld this year.
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