Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

You’ve heard of b5media, WeblogsInc, 9 rules, Gawker, and Web Log Empire, all of which pay different rates, have intensely differing numbers of employees, and different popularities. People want to get in on the whole “blog network” thing expecting big payouts, sometimes with great disappointment, so I’d like to talk about what’s fair in terms of blog network writer compensation, and what I pay my two underlings right now.

The deal I have with them is they take 90% of the raw profit minus pro-rated wordcount of whatever I write on those blogs. That means if they write 100% of their articles, they get 90% of the profit, the other 10% going to development costs and my own pocket. However, I chime in with maybe 5% of their posts, I’ll be taking 15% of their profit instead. This is fair, because it rewards us equally out of the remaining share, and gives me a 10% incentive to actively promote and work on their blogs.

One issue I have to sort out is tax liability. Currently my “employees” are family members (authorized to work in this country) who probably have never paid taxes before. Next month they’ll get their first payout, and I’m not exactly sure what to do with them. Options include withholding taxes in a seperate account or paying them everything and letting them sort it out. I’m not sure yet how I will have to file this on my tax forms, or if I’ll need to incorporate myself or not. This could definitely be a learning experience.

The last thing on my mind is a question–if you run a blog network, or a profitable set of blogs or websites with multiple authors, how do you cut up earnings?

As far as RSS goes, Feedburner is the hottest feed management technology. If you thought RSS was powerful before, it’s ten times as useful when powered by their propietary tracking and enhancement technologies. In this article, I am to show you how to convert your Wordpress feeds to work in Feedburner, and what value Feedburner adds to your site syndication.

Setting it up:

Sign up for a Feedburner account. Then, when it prompts you for the RSS url, give it the Wordpress absolute path:

This should be the wp-rss2.php file in the root of your WP installation directory. Why do we do this? Because the next step is to forward our RSS readers from the blog to the URL which Feedburner gives us with Apache mod_rewrite. When we do this, if told Feedburner to poll mysite.com/feed/ and mysite.com/feed/ to redirect to Feedburner, we’d have a recursive loop!

Now we just accept the title and url if they look ok, and activate our account:

Now you’ll see that they’ve given us the URL feeds.feedburner.com/VioxxNews . We want to set up our site to forward here, so go to the .htaccess file in the root of your Wordpress installation, and look for two lines that look like:

RewriteRule ^feed/(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$ /index.php?&feed=$1 [QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$ /index.php?&feed=$1 [QSA,L]

These two rules take requests for your feed, and send them to the real file. However, we’re using Feedburner now, so we need to change these to:

RewriteRule ^feed/(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/VioxxNews [QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/VioxxNews [QSA,L]

Now all requests for old feeds will be shunted through Feedburner! You should also add this ABOVE the # BEGIN WordPress block so that Wordpress doesn’t overwrite your rules with its own. Since yours are higher up, they’ll take precedence.

Adding value:

Now that we have Feedburner handling our rss/atom/rdf/xml feeds, we can leverage the best of its services to improve the quality of our syndication. Click on “Skip directly to feed management” to start! The first thing you want to enable is SmartFeed, under the Optimize tab:

Now your feed will automatically detect the type of agent visiting it and adjust its format between RSS and ATOM depending on its preferences and needs. This means that with one feed you can leverage a multi-format audience. Now there’s no distinction between RSS and ATOM readers: you just have a single XML feed.

Now go to the Publish tab, where we can add Pingshot–automatic pinging for your posts:

Everytime your RSS changes, you’ll send out pings. While this might seem a little spammy to me, it’s also a great idea to make sure ping services are getting notified about your content. The other cool Publicity tool to activate is the Feedcount widget:

Which will give you a publicity button like:

Discovering your feeds:

Feedburner also provides a number of tools to pry deep into the guts of your feeds, which fall under the “Analyse” tab of their administrative interface. Feed circulation gives the number of readers polling your feeds:

If you want more useful information, you should check out the Readership details:

Here you’ll see how many of your RSS hits are from real readers, search engines like IceRocket and Technorati, from spammers and scrapers, or other sources. This, in my opinion, is FeedBurner’s most powerful feature–the ability to satisfy curiousity about Feed membership. It’s easy to write a script to look for requests per day to /feed/, but that’s a lot more effort than just setting up FeedBurner and letting it do it’s thing.

Next steps:

If you’re a podcaster, FeedBurner will automatically do enclosures and make sure all the content types are correct. If you’re a big linker or big on Flickr, FeedBurner can splice your del.ic.ious feed into your blog feed, or splice in your photos. You can geotag, automatically add ticker symbols, create summary text, add a creative commons license, or adsense advertisments. If you can think of something to do to your feed, chances are Feedburner will help you get there.

Conclusion:

When I started using Feedburner, it was just for the tracking capabilities it has. But, I found a number of common useful options I’ve outlined about that add substantial value to your feed serving. In that regard, Feedburner adds more than just statistics and tracking. And, there are no competitors in its space. While every thing it does is relatively simple, it does a lot of them providing end-to-end RSS/ATOM/RDF/XML solutions for bloggers.

With the failed launch of Google Analytics and its inability to deliver immediate statistics and tracking uniformly across the blogosphere, I thought I’d bring out a few big no-nos we can all learn from.

First, don’t touch paying customers. If you roll out a free system and a pay system with identical functionality, the service agreements must be different. Free customers have no expectation to 100% reliability, so create a special network just for them. You can redirect them when they login, for example.

Second, don’t deliver a batchy service. You should be able to handle realtime traffic and analysis. Even if your backend is batchy, it should update with a high level of regularity. Real time data demands a real time system.

Third, support an infinite number of users. There’s nothing worse than closing off signup because you’re overwhelmed, or seeing a “too many connections” error message. There should be no restriction on the number of users that can register for an use your new web service, because you built it to scale. Just add more machines, right?

Fourth, support bursty traffic. You know when you launch something very cool, especially if you’re a big company (Google, Microsoft) that you will need to deal with a huge surge of interest at launch. So you should probably have a special pool of company-wide product launch machines that you can utilize until the spike is over.

Fifth, be reliable. By this I mean that if you provide any kind of data-gathering service, it cannot go down. If you’re tracking my advertising dollars, my website statistics, or some other fact, you must continue gathering and recording that data unless the earth ends. You can fail to analyse or process it and queue it up for the future if absolutely needed, but you may not destroy my data.

Sixth, make it easy. Your software should be able to partition the problem into parts that can solved by many machines in parallel. Your software should allow you to task new machines instantly and get them up and running with the rest of the cluster with no hassle. Your software should detect and correct for machines that go down automatically. Your software should detect and repurpose new machines to do their work. Your software should leverage the end-user as much as possible to save load on your servers.

If companies paid more attention to scaling considerations, they wouldn’t suffer such embarrassing product launches. There’s no point in hype if when we all look at you, there’s nothing there.