It looks like Google is rolling out suggested prepackaged ‘bundles’ (or is this something that they’re just promoting afresh? – update – seems it is an old feature according to commenters below) of RSS feeds for it’s users to subscribe to.
In categories like news, technology, video, cars and photography (a total of 15 categories) they are bundling popular feeds with between 5 and 9 feeds in each category.
Taking a quick look through the bundled feeds there isn’t too many surprises in the feeds included – although I’d have thought that they probably could have found a few more feeds in most categories.
Being included in one of these bundles would mean a serious increase in subscriber count – I wonder who one has to sleep speak with at Google to get included in one of them! I can think of one useful addition to their photography bundle!
I see no benefit whatsoever in that. Good for (some) bloggers, though.
The bundles are not new. All new Google Readers are shown the bundle page since some time now.
Google also populates the “Webclips” in new Gmail accounts with various RSS feeds. These are shown above the emails. It would be awesome to be one of the default feeds in the Webclips too.
I’m guessing that Google has just picked up the most popular and top ranking feeds and bundled them up together. Get your site high up in Google search engines and your feed may be added to the bundles and webclips too.
Hey there !
I am searching for the bundles, googled it and finally came back to your blog again ;) But I couldn’t find a way to access the bundles, have no url or directory … Could you implement one ? Would be great, Darren. Greetings from Germany –
Martin
FeedBurner is slowly introducing user-managed feed networks, but I believe they are still in beta. Letting us create and manage feed bundles makes much more sense.
Well this is a pretty old feature!!
hmmm – must be something that they are rolling out again and promoting to older readers as it just appeared in my Google Reader today when I logged in. It seemed familiar – but also different. They must be just promoting it again.
Yeah!
They’re always available when you click on ‘Browse’ button
Hmmm….let me see which feed bundles I can use
It must be something they do randomly as I don’t have one in my google reader.
@Alex I didn’t know that about feedburner it would be great to use a feed bundle instead of blogrolls for similar blogs.
Where`s the `Health` bundle …. babymoon.com.au misses out again. ;>)
Wow, I would kill to be in a bundle
I think there will be some system of automatically including the feeds otherwise Google will be deluged with millions of requests.
Yeah, this is an old feature, I remember seeing it when I started using Google Reader.
What would be interesting is if users could suggest their own bundles for other categories that haven’t been covered (or alternatives for the ones that are there). I’m not saying I’d suggest myself, but I’d like to see what other people thought were top Web Development blogs or Making Money blogs in your case, Darren.
The other thing that I’m waiting for is the automatic suggestion feature, where Google suggests more feeds based on the ones you already read.
Unfortunately, this has been around for quite a while. Sorry Darren.
phil – good suggestions!
I have written about Techcrunch onsite traffic compared to feed subscribers in the past. They benefit from new “subscribers” for almost every single RSS reader that tests something new. Based on their traffic I doubt they actually have more than 100-150K real subscribers.
Another example of how out of skew it can get is John Battelle
http://battellemedia.com/archives/003383.php
That was back in February, but even then Netvibes was much bigger than Rojo, yet not in John’s stats which show Rojo totally out of proportion.
I know when I first started using FeedReader that I added a couple bundles, I pruned the feeds later, but it was how I found a couple of blogs that I still read regularly.
User created feed bundles would definitely be cool and interactive, but at the time I was just thrilled to have an introduction to an area that I didn’t have to think about from an “authority”. I doubt I would have searched through user bundles. I might now, though, to find good reads I’m missing.
Hi Everyone,
I was able to find the “API” code through the google reader, but not sure what this is or how to use it for my blog.
Any suggestions?
Thanks,
Richard
This isn’t knew. This rolled out with reader when you clicked add a feed and then browse, a list similar to this was displayed. I still have the Technology group in my reader though I rarely have time to peruse it
I think Google keep it under wraps when it comes to being added to a bundle.
Can you imagine how many people would want to be a part of these bundles?
i don’t sign in for bundles. it will only clutter my *already* cluttered, oversized google reader. btw, think that it is good for new users of google reader though.
The photography bundle doesn’t seem like it features the highest-ranking or best stuff–and I’m not just saying that because I am dying to know how to get my photo blog in it. OK, maybe I am, but still…