Subscribers to my RSS feed will notice (hopefully) a few changes to how it looks today as I’m testing FeedBurner’s latest offering – a system called FeedFlare (press release) which gives publishers a few new interactive tools to show feed readers.
FeedFlare gives publishers the opportunity to activate any or all of the following features:
- most popular tags for this item via del.icio.us
- tag this item at del.icio.us
- Technorati cosmos: number of links to this post
- Creative Commons license for this specific item. This works even if you are splicing, say, a Flickr photo feed into a blog feed and the two parent feeds have different licenses associated with them.
- number of comments on this post (currently only for feeds created by WordPress)
- email this item
- email the author of this item (particularly helpful if the item ends up spliced into another feed or repurposed on a site).
I’m testing a few of them which you can see in action here. I’m not including the creative commons one at this point or the ’email author’ one. All the others are activated but I’m yet to see it counting my comments to this point despite there being numerous posts with comments recently.
All in all I think it’s a smart move from FeedBurner and takes a step toward overcoming some of the problems with RSS feed (ie lack of interactivity).
Same here: the “comment count” doesn’t work for any of my blogs.
What about the del.icio.us tags feature? Do we need to install a WordPress plugin to add del.icio.us tags to each post? As far I can see, it’s not using the Technorati tags…
Ah, I got it. They actually check whether each post is on del.icio.us, and if so they get the tags from there.
Yes indeed feedflare is a great tool. I had tried it and seems to work pretty well.