FeedBurner Testing Blog Networks
Sunday, August 06, 2006
FeedBurner, a popular RSS feed management service, is rumored to be testing out a new product slated to be released in September, called "Networks", which will group a number of blogs that are similar in category (They must also be using FeedBurner to manage their RSS feed). The idea behind Networks is to allow people to subscribe to whole categories, an RSS feed featuring content from every blog within that Network. For example, the Venture Capital network feed can be found here, and lists all of the posts from every blog in the network.FeedBurner is planning to have respectful bloggers manage the Networks, by inviting other bloggers in the same niche topic into the Network and to make sure that only blogs that are on topic are included. However, I think that having bloggers running the Networks will end in problems. There are many blogs that cover a handful of topics, how will it get categorized into one Network? What constitutes as good editorial content? But, the biggest question is will the people actually doing the work, the content writers, get any part of the advertising revenue generated from the Network? Everyone is concerned about who's actually getting paid because of someone's work, and I think that this question will ultamitly be the cause of death to FeedBurner's new service.
