Lazy Linkage – Google Buys Feedburner

May 24, 2007 | News

So, looking out into the internet, what’s going on this week? For those of you who may be running a blog on Wordpress.com, something new is available to you. Wordpress has begun allowing folks with domains mapped to the service to now use email using their own domain, with Gmail as the email client. That’s a welcome addition for Wordpress.com users, however I still maintain that having your own Wordpress installation offers MUCH better flexibility. Pick The Brain has also posted a great write-up on 27 lessons he learned while bringing his blog up to 3,000 visitors daily.

On the productivity front, I recently listened to the latest podcast over at Internet Business Mastery. In it, they talk about the book The 4-Hour Workweek. Yaro also interviewed the author of this book over at Entreprenuers-Journey.com. That’s two separate sites talking about this guy, so I guess he’s on a bit of a media blitz. But, the book sounds very intriguing. Without having read it, it seems to be about the idea of running your business primarily through outsourcing and allowing yourself to live the lifestyle you want rather than allowing your business to become your lifestyle. It’s interesting enough where I will probably pick up a copy and check it out. Not that I intend to cut my work week down to 4 hours (gimme a frickin’ break), but it sounds like there are some great, workable concepts in this book.

It has just been confirmed over at Techcrunch that Google has purchased FeedBurner. Total purchase price is somewhere around $100 Million. That’s a great payday for the guys who started FeedBurner. FeedBurner is, of course, the very popular service which allows you to set up and promote an RSS feed for your website. You have to have a feed already to use FeedBurner. That is, it won’t create your feed for you. Instead, it acts as a go-between to your real feed and that service allows things like tracking, stats, etc. This is a good move on Google’s part, since their fairly obvious mission is to organize all the world’s information. That mission means they need a lot of information, and with the purchase of Feedburner, they are now going to have vast amounts of data regarding RSS feed use, publishing and advertising. For you and me, this is probably going to be good. After all, when Google bought Urchin and turned it into Google Analytics, they not only improved the service but they made it free. Google seems to love giving away free stuff, and I would expect the Feedburner service not only to improve, but any paid services of Feedburner may end up being free. You never know. On the flip side, this could spell problems for any other RSS services. And, it also means Google’s empire grows even more.

The New York Post, of all publications, has a story about Google purging ads-heavy websites from their networks. Basically, the rumor here is that Google is going around and purging their Adsense network of the “made for Adsense” sites…the ones with hardly any content but TONS of Adsense ads. I’ve seen a lot of these, and the publishers are probably just relying on the “safety by numbers” thing, hoping Google won’t find them due to the number of Adsense publishers. While I don’t like to see people being cut off from Adsense, I can see the point. The best way to avoid it is to provide actual content to the internet. Don’t try to “cheat the system” by throwing up sites designed to do nothing but target keywords and rake in money.

Smashing Magazine, one of my favorite blogs offering up valuable link collections on design, has posted a collection of free icon collections. Very nice stuff.

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