FeedFlare: Add Interactivity in your Feeds

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FeedFlare: Add Interactivity in your Feeds

By Pankaj May 17, 2007 filed in Internet Marketing, Blogging Tips

A very simple but effective way to introduce interactivity in your feeds is by enabling FeedFlare provided by FeedBurner. All you have to do is to register yourself at FeedBurner.com and enable the FeedFlare available in the ‘Optimize’ tab. If you are not sure whether you should burn your feeds or not, read my previous post: Do I need to use FeedBurner? Does it help? . Back to this post, FeedFlare adds a simple footer in your RSS feed which could include variety of links and information. Among the many flares, few of them (popular ones as per me) are described below…

Email This - Allows subscriber to email the current item to anyone using a web-based email form provided by FeedBurner.
Email the Author - Allows subscribers to email the author directly that is to you using a web based form provided by FeedBurner. If you haven’t mentioned your email id in your feed details then ‘Email the Author’ link is not displayed.
Comments Count - This flare works only if you have self hosted WordPress blog or have some other system which uses wfw:comments element in the feed. This flare shows the number of comments posted to this particular item.
Save to del.icio.us - Shows the number of saves and the top tags for the item at del.icio.us and allows readers to save the item at del.icio.us.
Digg This! - Displays the number of Diggs and comments for the item at digg.com and allows readers to digg the story.
Discuss on Newsvine - Publishes a link to this story on Newsvine and creates a conversation.
Stumble It! - Submit to StumbleUpon, with dynamic count of number of reviews.
Technorati Cosmos Links - Displays the number of links to your item from blogs, as measured by Technorati. (If there are no links, this Flare will not appear.)
View Creative Commons License - - Displays the Creative Commons license that you may have applied to your feed (or to individual content items).
Scape This - A FeedFlare for Netscape.com.

These are only some of the flares in the entire range available, here is a catalog of the flares which you can choose from FeedFlare Catalog

A screenshot showing flares in a feed is displayed below

Okay I am going a little backwards in my note today. The very first question would have been that is there any real benefit of enabling the flares on your feed? In my opinion, there is. Speaking from my personal experience, I would love to act on the content I am reading. If I really liked it, I would want to save it on del.icio.us as a bookmark for future use/read or digg it on digg.com. I would also want to forward the item to my friends which I think might be interested in but I generally don’t do any of these things. Reason, too lazy. Why, takes too much of effort from my side. Requires me to open the post on the blog it is published at and then copy the URL and so on so forth. Now imagine if I don’t have to do anything of this sort. I just have to click links within the feed itself and do whatever I want to do. This is exactly what flares are designed to do. So by enabling flares for your feed as a publisher, you are actually encouraging me as a reader to act on your content (you reduced the pain for me) and if I digg your story or bookmarked it, you enhancing the chances of your blog to become more visible and reaching out to more readers. More visibility means more readers and more readers amounts to more traffic and more traffic definitely adds to your top line (revenue). Isn’t what we all want?