Alright, so we’re a little behind on announcing this feature as well. It’s been live for weeks and is a real time-saver for everyone involved: the new, self-service Feed Transfer capability. As more and more people build blogs and burn feeds, changes in content ownership and control lead to the desire to move a FeedBurner feed from one account to another. In ye goode olde days, someone who wanted to transfer a feed to another account used to a submit a request to us, and then a staffer in our own Central Planning and Command-Line Voodoo department would verify the accounts and then complete the actual feed transfer. Reliable, but time-consuming and tedious for all parties involved.

Away with workaday drudgery! If you own a feed, you may now transfer it to anyone you like simply by using the Transfer Feed… link, which is listed on your feed’s details page and is handily pictured below:

Just provide the email address of the person you wish to transfer this feed to and FeedBurner will send them a transfer request email. The recipient clicks a link in the email and then creates or signs into a FeedBurner account and accepts the transfer on-the-spot. The transfer itself will be completed immediately, moving the feed from your account to theirs. (Please note that only feed owners may initiate transfers from their own accounts to others. Additional how-to info about Feed Transfer is in our Help Center topic.)

We hope this update makes the process of moving feeds around much simpler for all of you. Thanks for letting us know just how popular (and necessary) this feature is!

As we recently posted, FeedBurner’s integration into Google is moving along. We’ve got our coding hats on and are hard at work to get the essential product pieces where they need to be.

However, one somewhat-below-the-radar part of FeedBurner’s integration that is already showing up as part of google.com is our new Help Center. (Well, “new” as of late 2007. We admit to being a touch slow on the draw with the PR on this one.) We point this out to show that migrating to a Googley-er tomorrow isn’t strictly tied to FeedBurner charts ‘n graphs ‘n numbers. It used be difficult to find answers; a popup window here, a Forums post there, a blog post over yonder. The Help Center brings sorely needed structure (and searchability) to a bunch of resources that were largely scattered about before. You can now find topics like “What is a Subscriber? How does FeedBurner tally them?”, and “Is there a feed file size limit?” in just one place. (We’ve still got nothing for you on “How can I avoid jury duty selection?”) The Help Center will soon introduce new troubleshooting topics and contact options as well.

Speaking of the Forums: they are overdue for the Google treatment, too. We’ve provided them since shortly after FeedBurner launched as an essential, community-powered companion to the service itself. In the next few weeks, the Forums will move to a new Google Group, with the following benefits:

• Much less spam
• Improved [BUY CH3AP STUFF ONL1NE] search for old topics and conversations
• New email notification options when new topics are posted
• Much, much [FREE V!AGRA NOW] less spam

We also want to point out that FeedBurner Japan is also going to benefit from these Help Center and Groups changes, too. But what about the many other languages FeedBurner publishers use? Google strongly believes in making products accessible to the widest global audience; efforts to formally localize FeedBurner for the most popular and requested languages are under way, going well beyond the options we currently offer.

And, finally: Leap Year post!

Hi there. You may be looking in your feed reader every day and thinking “Another no-news-’bout-FeedBurner day.” You may be starting to think, “Are they still in there? In the FeedBurner bubble, burning the feeds? Did somebody maybe shut off their connection to the Tubes?” You may be thinking that or worse. We have some good news, and some just newsy news.

First, the good news. We are totally still here, burning the feeds, writing the checks (that’s some sweet cursive Giuliana’s wielding), and analyzing the analytics.

Next, the newsy news, aka “what we did over summer and winter and spring vacation.” If you are looking for juicy announcements, this section is NOT for you. This is more like the academic paper section of the post, except for the fact it lacks erudition and other big vocabulary words. We have been and are busy integrating FeedBurner into a more Googley way of life. This Googley way of life is very different on the backend architecture side, so the team has been busy both scaling and maintaining the existing environment, while simultaneously rewriting the system to act like one of the cool kids in the more Googley (Googly? Can we get a ruling on this one?) architecture world.

Read more »

Update II (10-Nov-2007): Hopefully you’re seeing Feedfetcher stats again in your subscriber count report for November 9th. Not all feeds may have their numbers back yet, but all should be restored starting with today’s numbers, which will be summarized tomorrow morning, 11-Nov, CST.

Update (9-Nov-2007): We are aware that Google Feedfetcher has not reported subscribers for most FeedBurner feeds for the November 8th reporting cycle as well. FeedBurner is in direct contact with the Feedfetcher team and while we know the issue isn’t yet resolved, we will post another update to this once we have an answer. Also, just to confirm, there is nothing about your FeedBurner account or feed settings that you should change at this time. Hang in there; we’re on the case!

If you saw your subscriber count drop precipitously in your Saturday, November 3rd summary from FeedBurner, the reason is that specific subscriber stats from Google Feedfetcher were offline because this service was apparently out late with friends on Friday night, and well, it completely slept through Saturday. It appears to have rallied, however, and amid firm declarations of “I’m never doing that again”, Feedfetcher has started diligently reporting subscriber numbers to us, early this morning Pacific Time. FeedBurner publishers’ subscriber counts should be closer to what you’d normally expect starting with reports that will be available on Monday morning.

There’s really nothing spookier than hollow, empty ad spaces rattling around your blog and/or web site, putting no cash in your pocket nor any extra hob- in your goblin. Before you banish these underperforming idlers to some distant house upon a lonely hill, we recommend redeeming them with a chance to boost your earning potential. This Halloween, the FeedBurner development team is asking those of us who do the announcing around here to make note of the now-available integration of FeedBurner site ads and AdSense.

This newly integrated capability — designed just for FeedBurner-powered content like yours — puts relevant AdSense content ads to work on your blog and/or website. (Note: AdSense options for feeds not available at this time.) If you choose to activate this service, you can run a 300×250 or 468×60 text or image AdSense ad on your blog. The ad will appear below the first item on your site and archive pages once you have installed the necessary code. Ad content is automatically targeted to complement your site and you will earn revenue each time visitors click on ads. You can even customize the colors (or use a saved color palette from your AdSense account) so the ad unit fits your site’s look and feel. Check out these 300×250 examples below.
Read more »

Earlier today, the Google Reader team described the new subscriber stats feature now available in Reader’s search results. We’ll go grab a donut while you take a moment to read the thorough post.

As the Reader team discusses at the bottom of their post, it’s important to remember that FeedBurner is aggregating your Google Reader (and Newsgator and Bloglines and…) statistics across all feeds that you may be redirecting through FeedBurner either via your own http configuration wizardliness or through plugins like FeedSmith or maybe even through simple and direct integrations like those in Typepad and Blogger.

We’ve consolidated subscriber stats from most of the far corners of the feed subscription universe (yes, we are going on record and saying the universe has corners and is a simple geometric shape - we are not yet committing to whether it’s 3D/4D/5D, but we are saying it has corners), in order to give you the most complete picture of your audience. There are thousands of feed-reading services with even more services jumping into the distributed media hottub every day (yes, we are going on record as saying it’s a hottub, not an ecosystem), so checking your detailed subscriber analytics page within FeedBurner is always a good place to find out where there are new services that are incorporated into your statistics.

Please pay special attention to the information that may be revealed in the new Google Reader subscriber stats as it may point out instances where you have inadvertently fragmented your audience by offering more than one flavor of your feed to the public. No worries, as this is easily remedied. Again, you can redirect any outliers to your FeedBurner feed and instructions for Blogger, TypePad and Wordpress are available.

Can you imagine adding fun, targeted video content to your site, while earning revenue at the same time? No, really. Picture the majesty, the drama, the undeniable spectacle of it all. Video. Your site. Total togetherness. It’s a dreamlike state.

Whoa, snap out of it! This video-makes-money-on-your-site thing is now a solid reality. Google AdSense announced today a new offering called video units. Video units let website publishers choose relevant content from select YouTube partners and have it streamed to their sites within a highly customizable video player. The videos are supported with user-friendly, targeted advertising, both above the video content and within the bottom 20% of the viewing area. Video units are now available in the U.S. for English language websites that are signed up for an AdSense account.

If you want to learn more and see a sample video unit, you can check out the AdSense blog. If you’re ready to get started, sign in to your AdSense account. You’ll need to sign up for AdSense to take advantage of this new service.

Happy viewing!

This post has been brought to you by Ryan Hayward, aspiring blogger and Product Marketing Manager for Google AdSense.

This post is a quick note from the foreman down at the FeedBurner ironworks and custom tools depot. If you’re a new or longtime user of FeedBurner FeedSmith — our plugin for WordPress that helps ensure you count all of your blog’s feed traffic through FeedBurner — there is a recommended security-related update to this plugin for you to download. Here are the details:

Potential security vulnerability
Some WordPress plugins that permit the entry of user-entered values, such as older versions of FeedSmith, can be vulnerable to what is called a “cross-site request forgery.” Without getting overly technical, this permits someone to change WordPress plugin settings on your system without you noticing during the time you are signed into your WordPress control panel. And no one wants that. Read more »