Rick Klau is the Vice President of Business Development for the RSS feed managing service FeedBurner. The company's service increases the usability of RSS syndication for readers and publishers, provides analytics like number of subscribers and much more.

FeedBurner manages almost 250,000 RSS feeds, including more than 40,000 podcasts, for nearly 150,000 feed publishers. Beyond thousands of blog feeds ran through FeedBurner, the company also services the RSS feeds for Reuters, USA Today and Newsweek.

In the following IM interview, Rick and I covered many different topics. You can skip to any of them by clicking on the keyword links below. Your browser's back arrow will return you to the top of the interview.

If you would like more in-depth background information regarding FeedBurner, I have recently posted an article titled How and Why to Use FeedBurner on my personal blog.

Interview keywords (click to skip to a particular topic)

adoption, analytics, non-reproducable services, advertising, branding, avoiding lock-in, international issues, future ubiquity/impacts

Marshall:

Is RSS just for super-geeks and early adopters?

Rick:

A fair question, but the growth we're seeing across publishers would suggest that we're rapidly moving out of the early adopter phase.

I think it's more common to talk about 'feeds' now in general, and the release of IE 7, MS Vista and other tools will only accelerate adoption.

Yahoo's study last fall suggests that 30% or more of Internet users are *using* feeds, while less than 10% are actually aware of it.

Marshall:

Are the above the primary factors you'd cite regarding the extension of adoption to mass audiences? Are there others?

Rick:

A combination of factors are contributing, to be sure. The rise of weblogs as an easy, effective medium for communication certainly laid the groundwork for the adoption.

As more weblogs popped up, feeds became even more prevalent - and the early adopters liked that they could subscribe to a number of weblogs without having to remember to visit each site every day. It was simply more efficient.

And that model, of course, translates quite nicely to any news-oriented site, where they're publishing new content on a regular basis. Once My Yahoo! included support for feeds, the mass market recognized an easy way to get the information they wanted delivered to them.

I think an overall frustration at the volume of email - coupled with spam - has led to an increased appetite for alternate ways of receiving information, and feeds really fit the bill.

Marshall:

Is it safe to say that Feedburner makes RSS both easier to use and more functional for publishers?

Rick:

I certainly hope so! I think most publishers who care about their audience want to know more about the audience how big is it? Is it growing? Are they reading? Those questions are hard to answer without us, and we work with publishers to make sure that their feeds are as measurable as any other medium they've embraced.

Once they understand the audience, they get a better sense of how they can make their feeds more effective by adjusting what content goes into the feed, by adding functionality (like with FeedFlare), etc.

A simple but powerful addition we provide is the XSLT stylesheet, which sounds terribly geeky but makes a publisher's feeds more effective. Instead of seeing raw XML code when they click on a feed, they see what appears to be a web page, with explanatory text. "This is a feed, this is what you can do with it..." That dramatically increases user adoption.

Marshall:

That's fantastic, so glad that was an early function you provided.

Can you explain why analytics are so difficult with RSS and how Feedburner is able to offer things like subscriber numbers?

Rick:

Sure. Over the past years, we've become good at understanding web stats unique visitors, page views, hits.

But with feeds, the dynamic is different. Some aggregators poll many times throughout the day on behalf of one person (FeedDemon, NetNewsWire).

And other aggregators poll regularly on behalf of a lot of people (My Yahoo!, NewsGator Online, Bloglines).

So looking at *hits* doesn't tell the publisher anything meaningful. We have some feeds where feed hits are 10x the subscriber number, and other feeds where hits are 1/3 of the subscriber number. It's all over the map, and there are no "standard" multipliers to discern subscriber numbers.

Since there's no notion of cookies for tracking feed subscribers, the only other way you can determine subscriber numbers is to understand how each aggregator behaves - and with the 250,000 feeds we manage, we see more than 2000 aggregators!

By understanding their behaviors - how often do they request feeds, what do they look like when they show up, etc. - we can then figure out how many individuals are actually subscribed to the feed.

Marshall:

Are there other things that FeedBurner provides that a large organization with a good tech crew wouldn't be able to provide themselves?

Rick:

I think there are two differentiators on this front. One is "uncomon uses", a new feature we launched a couple weeks ago, and the other is FeedFlare.

Uncommon uses lets us compare a single feed's behavior to the growing universe of feeds we manage.

Chances are that if an application, website or user is interacting with your feed in a way that we don't see on any other feed for any of the other m subscribers we reach each day, then that may be something that's cause for further investigation. It may be a *good* thing - a popular website that is resyndicating your content and exposing your information to a wide audience. Or it could be a spam blogger, resyndicating your feed and throwing Adsense on the page to try and generate money off of your content.

But a publisher who only sees *their* feed stats won't necessarily be able to discern this uncommon usage, since they won't see anywhere near as broad a cross-section of feed activity on behalf of so many applications and subscribers.

FeedFlare is another area where I think we add value that would be hard to build individually. By building an open platform, we've built in a capability for publishers to dynamically hook into web services (Technorati, del.icio.us, Digg, others) as well as their own applications and services, so that their feeds become more interactive. It gives feed subscribers more to do, which creates a more vibrant community. The technology behind FeedFlare is quite sophisticated, but the implementation is literally a one-click affair - and publishers get a set of very powerful tools to enhance their feed.

Marshall:

Have users developed anything interesting yet with the FeedFlare API?

Rick:

We have a growing catalog of Flares here http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/popup-flarecatalog

I've learned about services I'd never heard of, it's fun to see such quick adoption after just a couple weeks.

One publisher used FeedFlare to make the content's origin explicit after finding a site was scraping her feed and trying to monetize it without her permission. Neat idea.

Marshall:

Are there other functions that you haven't mentioned yet that are particularly useful in an organizational context?

As opposed to individual blog publishers, that is.

Rick:

Certainly a driver for commercial publishers is the ability to monetize their content via advertising. We've built out an ad network that lets publishers place ads into their feeds, in addition to selling their own ads to their advertisers. This lets publishers commit more comfortably to feeds where the conventional wisdom says that you shouldn't "give away" your content.

If they can monetize their subscriber base while also encouraging click-throughs from the feed back to their website, they can make feeds a more integral part of their content and revenue strategy.

That becomes a win-win, as subscribers gain access to content via feeds that might not otherwise have been published, and publishers gain a revenue stream while also driving more concentrated traffic back to their website.

Marshall:

Is the advertising contextual?

Rick:

Most of the advertising that we place is placed by channel rather than by tying to keywords. If you think about how feeds are consumed, they're more about reading a particular publication (weblog, magazine, etc.). That's pretty fundamentally different than how much of a website's traffic is generated by people searching for content or clicking on a link to read a specific article.

So whereas contextual ads work well in a transactional setting - where people have sought specific content out - that's not the model we think will serve advertisers and publishers well in feeds.

Marshall:

Do you have advertisers yet that would be well suited to nonprofit channels?

Rick:

We do. I actually had a very interesting conversation yesterday with a soon-to-be advertiser, who has a product that's a combination of socially conscious and consumer-oriented. The ideal audience for this product would be an environmentally responsible individual - which, considering many non-profits whose content I read on a regular basis, would be a perfect fit.

There are other examples of course, but considering that many of the sites participating in the "news and information" channel are political weblogs, I think there's quite a bit of overlap in audiences.

Marshall:

What sorts of branding options are available for organizations through Feedburner?

Rick:

First and foremost, if you define an image associated with your feed, that gets displayed prominently on your feed's browser-friendly page. So instead of seeing raw XML code, you see the posts in the feed formatted like a web page, and you see your organization's logo right up top.

Secondly, organizations that want to point to their own URL can map a subdomain so that they promote their domain instead of ours. (Instead of feeds.feedburner.com/yourfeed, the domain would be feeds.yourdomain.com/yourfeed.)

This helps preserve consistency in a site's branding, which can often be very important for an organization.

Marshall:

Can you explain some of the ways that Feedburner prevents lock-in with its service?

Rick:

Absolutely. The first step is that we recommend publishers use a URL redirect instead of promoting their FeedBurner feed directly. Details are here: http://forums.feedburner.com/viewtopic.php?t=17

That's a bit techie, but the premise is simple use a simple server configuration to route requests for your feed over to us. If you ever decide you don't like us, you can simply turn off that redirect, and subscribers will go back to retrieving the feed from your server.

Second, we further recommend using My Brand (the domain mapping I spoke of above); this means that the URL you redirect people to is *yours* - if you decide to stop using FeedBurner, you can simply re-map the subdomain to your own servers.

Finally, we not only make it easy to remove a feed from our service (by clicking "Delete Feed" in your control panel), when you do so, we give you the option of redirecting any subscribers to your FeedBurner feed *back* to your original URL. That means that your subscribers will be re-routed to your source feed, ensuring that you don't lose any subscribers.

Marshall:

That sounds great. What kind of international support do you offer?

Rick:

We have several localized versions of our Browser Friendly page (Italian, Spanish, Dutch, German, Japanese), and the system supports internationalized character sets. We also have a dedicated site for the Japanese market at http://www.feedburner.jp/.

More languages are planned (we have a very generous user community who keeps offering up new languages), and we'll get them up as soon as they're available.

Marshall:

Could subscribers be identified individually if it came down to it?

Say, if the Iranian government wanted to know who was reading a certain Iranian blog that irked it?

Rick:

No. One of the advantages (from a subscriber's perspective) is that subscribing to a feed is a completely opt-in, anonymous action.

That said, if you use a web-based service, you're potentially vulnerable to that service giving up your subscription list. And some (like Bloglines) actually have an option whereby your subscription list is shared publicly, which some users don't know.

(That has its own benefits, but in the scenario you painted it's something that users ought to know about.)

Marshall:

But it's the feed aggregators that are pinging Feedburner, not the individual subscribers right? So disclosure of users subscribed to a given feed would be up to the aggregating service - is that correct?

Rick:

That's correct.

In the case of web-based, or centralized services.

Individual, client-side aggregators (those installed on a user's machine) don't have the same centralization of data.

Marshall:

So in your interview with Hobson and Holtz you discussed a number of interesting thematic directions you hoped the RSS mileu would move in. Care to mention a few of those for our forward looking readers?

Rick:

One interesting trend is the increasing ubiquity of feeds.

When we started the company, feeds were by and large on weblogs. Now we see consumer news sites publishing feeds. Web services publishing feeds. Broadcast networks producing audio and video podcasts.

And increasing innovation is going into how to index those feeds in a meaningful way. Look at Edgeio - which checks feeds for posts tagged "listing" and automatically adds them to a kind of decentralized eBay. As more ad hoc structure gets produced, you'll see more of these sites find ways to intelligently index feed content and share it with users in a meaningful way.

It seems pretty clear that the direction we're headed in on the consumer side, thanks largely to Microsoft's plans with IE 7 and Vista, is towards all information being subscribable. Whether it's my "My Pictures" folder automatically delivering new photos to family members via a feed, or updates to my Outlook calendar, or recent changes to a document - each of these scenarios anticipates a feed that one or more people can subscribe to.

Where FeedBurner's focused is on streamlining the feed delivery process, and adding enhancements to the feed that make it a more interactive and useful experience. I'm very excited about the potential.

It means every one of us becomes a publisher - and the ways in which we think about publication and consumption get very broad, very quickly.

For new developments at FeedBurner you can subscribe to the company's blog, Burning Door.com.