ResearchBuzz

Now that FeedBurner has been acquired by Google, it’s probably not too surprising that Google has FeedBurner tags on some of its blogs (alas, not all, not yet.) I had some fun wandering around the blogs and seeing what was being read the most. (Being read the most in FeedBurner, of course; this doesn’t count how many people are visiting the Web site, watching the pages, etc.)

The Official Google Blog has as you might expect over 440 THOUSAND readers. I’m surprised that the Gmail blog has less than 5000 readers (of course, it’s much more new.) GMail’s FeedBurner readership is only about 500 more than the Orkut blog, which I would not have expected.

Meanwhile, the Google.org blog has less than 300 readers in FeedBurner — very surprising! The Google Mashup Editor blog has less than 500, less surprising since this application is not yet publicly available.

Between the GMail blog and the Google.org, blog, the Public Policy Blog has over 2000 readers.

I can’t wait for the FeedBurner badge to be added to the all the Google blogs. How is the Google Reader blog stacking up against Google Book Search? What about Google LatLong or Inside AdWords? The mind boggles…

This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .

I think I have mentioned before that Amazon’s search engine gives me a rash. But yet the site contains so much information I can’t help using it. And despite the fact that Amazon’s regular search engine bothers me a lot, there are other offerings on the site that are making it more and more fun to use. Forum threads, for example, are now available by RSS feeds.

You may have noticed at the bottom of Amazon’s product pages there are links to forum threads. Sometimes all you need to do to find interesting discussions to monitor is find a related book, then look at the discussions going on around that book. Other times you might want to do a search outside Amazon for interesting threads. If you want to use Google to search Amazon for forum threads, here is your base search:

site:amazon.com inurl:forum

Add your keywords. Note also that Amazon has a forum for each tag that’s been used on Amazon, and often they don’t have any discussions around them. You can eliminate those by adding -inurl:tag to your search.

If you do a search like lactose intolerant site:amazon.com inurl:forum you’ll see a couple dozen results covering everything from parenting to making yogurt to, for some reason, Sony. Once you’ve found a topic of interest that you’d like to monitor, look for the RSS feed link and symbol in the right nav. If you have an Amazon account you can also sign up to get e-mails when a forum thread updates.

I think for very technical, computer related discussions, I would still refer to Usenet, Yahoo Groups, or Google Groups. But I think for more consumer-oriented discussions or “everyday life” discussions, this’ll be the place I start. Amazon has a ton of traffic and has made it very easy for anyone to put in their two cents.

Now if I could just use the regular search engine without tearing all my hair out…

RSS stats site FeedBurner.com has announced that its premium services are now free.

This includes number of item views and unique number of people who read your feed. It also includes the MyBrand service, where you use the FeedBurner features but keep the URL of the RSS feed on your own site.

If you have a heavily-used RSS feed on your site, or even if you’re just interested in seeing what content of yours people are finding the most interesting, I really recommend FeedBurner. I had no idea how popular Bloglines or Pageflakes were until I started using FeedBurner. I’m also continually surprised by what items I post generate the most interest and the most clicks. Finally, FeedBurner makes it really easy for me to integrate my posts over at WRAL (the Tech Talk) blog with FeedBurner so I have everything in one place. And now all those stats and services are totally free!

Cool. Take a look!