outbrain

Get ratings on your FeedBurner feeds

One of the most frequently asked questions we get is: "Most of my audience reads my posts via RSS and not on my website. How can I get my RSS readers to also rate my content?"

As of today we're making our ratings available for integration within FeedBurner RSS feeds. We've used the FeedFlare API to provide you with an embedded rating link within all your posts.

Enabling the outbrain FeedFlare is super-easy. Simply follow these steps:

1. Login to your FeedBurner account.
2. Click on the 'Optimize' tab, and select the 'FeedFlare' option.
3. Scroll down to the section called "Personal FeedFlare" and paste the following URL into the text box: http://widgets.outbrain.com/FeedFlareUnit.xml
4. Click on the "Add New Flare" button, and check the '[x] feed' checkbox.
5. IMPORTANT: Don’t forget to click the 'Save' button at the bottom of the page. (or - the 'Activate' button if this is the first FeedFlare you are enabling)

That's it! It's important to note that FeedFlares may take a while to update with the freshest rating data. This is a FeedBurner limitation and there's little we can do about it.

If you have any feedback or comments or bugs to report, please post them on our support forum. 

The RSS Beast - we couldn't have said it better...

If you're not sure what outbrain is all about, the following post is for you.

Kohi Vinh over at Subtraction.com feels the RSS pain:

"...I’ve collected so damn many RSS feeds that, when I sit down in front of the application, it’s almost as difficult a challenge as having no feed reader whatsoever. With dozens and dozens of subscriptions, each filled with dozens of unread posts, I often don’t even know where to start.

In the past, friends have advised me to just narrow my list down to a manageable number of essential subscriptions — a bare few that I can consume easily, day in and day out. But every time I try to do that, I find that I can’t really bear to get rid of most of these feeds. They all seem essential, and I’m loathe to give any of them up. Of course, I understand the corollary of that reluctance: refusing to part with most of these feeds means I’ll probably continue to benefit from very few of them."

Matt from 37signals follows up:

"I don’t think he’s alone. A lot of people want to keep up with what’s going on at a specific RSS feed but don’t have the time to read everything there. So people wind up following the advice of Khoi’s friends — ruthless pruning of any feed deemed inessential, even though some of the content there is desired.

If content was filtered better, these on-the-fence sites would at least have a chance to stick around."

Matt goes on to list a few options for sorting through the RSS avalanche.

We're not there yet, but this is exactly the problem we're trying to solve at outbrain:
How to combine the collective intelligence of like-minded RSS/blog readers and save you time by floating the best posts and flagging the worst.