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Googler Dolapo Falola has spent his 20% self-allocated time improving the mobile version of Google Reader, especially tinkering with the iPhone-ized app, which is easily the most comfortable way to read feeds on the go - thx! all important features (sharing & starring items, tags) are accessible through the top navigation and the app is sufficiently fast even on slow EDGE/GSM connections.

(just goto reader.google.com on your iPhone).

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RSS-publisher FeedBurner published an extensive report on RSS-readership and -usage, the latter meaning detailed stats on the number of indiviual item-clicks & -renderings (coined “audience engagement”). no big surprise - as mentioned before, Google Reader has taken the market of online feed-readers by storm…

as of yesterday, Google finally reports back RSS subscription-numbers to content-publishers, which basically means that feed-statistics like FeedBurner can now include the number of readers subscribed to a feed through Google Reader or the personalized Google homepage (this wasn’t possible before, meaning that probably thousands of readers wouldn’t show up in your feed-stats). in case you - like me - wonder how this works, Google simply embeds the number of current subscribers into the http-request fetching the feed:

User-Agent: Feedfetcher-Google;
(+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html; 3980 subscribers;
feed-id=1794595805790851116)

as a bonus they’ve also added an FAQ aimed at publishers.

btw, according to my own FeedBurner-stats, Google Reader’s marketshare among RSS-readers seems to rise:

wow, the whole web is singing the praises of Yahoo! Tubes Pipes, a new mashup-service announced earlier today. unfortunately, the Pipes-servers haven’t been responding for most of the evening, Yahoo’s engineers have either underestimated the impact of this announcement or the ressources a service which could be described best as universal RSS-mashup-engine might suck up. however, from what I’ve seen in the short period of availability, Pipes offers a drag&drop interface which allows users to query, combine, filter, merge etc various source-feeds into one output-feed. besides pre-defined RSS-sources (including Google Base, surprisingly), users may of course add any given RSS-feed (OPML-support seems to miss). very promising so far, lets hope the plombers fix the Pipes soon…

(screenshot courtesy of TechCrunch)

FeedShake is a lightweight tool allowing feed-junkies to merge an arbitrary number of RSS- and atom-sources into a single target-feed. word-filters allow further refinement of resulting feed-items, which could be easily used to create vertical meta-feeds similar to earFeeder. on the downside, FeedShake does neither cache feeds nor straighten out invalid XML in source-feeds.

want to receive all the latest news, blogposts, tourdates, videos of your favorite artists? earFeeder (beta) scans your local harddrive for media-files and builds a customized RSS-feed syndicating various sources matching the artists found in your library. since the media-scan is based on a Java-applet, earFeeder doesn’t require local installation.

update: after being subscribed to my personal earFeeder-newsstream for two days I’m a bit disappointed - despite I submitted about 300 artists to source my feed, earFeeder hasn’t brought up much more than some iTunes-notifications. seems like earFeeder’s feed-base isn’t big enough right now…

Google launched a major revamp of their online RSS-reader earlier today. while the initial product has been critizied among the blogosphere for being somewhat half-hearted, this release seems to get it right (see TechCrunch or Scoble). new features include counters for unread messages, folder-based navigation, continuous scrolling (this one is cool!) and easy sharing of feeds. (smart-)phone users should check out the mobile version at http://www.google.com/reader/m which aggregates all feeds into one river-of-news.

Feedvertising offers bloggers - no matter how big their readership (actually the service turns down low-traffic sites) - a free & easy way to sell advertising-space in their RSS-feeds. Feedvertising works without changing the feed-URL, instead ads are inserted into the feed by a plugin extending the blogging-software (currently only Wordpress [self-hosted] is supported, with other systems soon to come). publishers can freely choose to sell adspace via Feedvertising or instead host in-house advertisments (like f.e. TechCrunch does). ads are HTML-text only, with prices calculated considering the feeds traffic, link popularity and overall topic. publishers share revenue with Feedvertising 50/50.

while Dave Winer’s rivers of news deservedly have gathered most interest of the mobile community over the last month (see TechCrunch, OM Daily), online feed-reader Bloglines offers a mobile version of its service since quite a while. the interface is almost as stripped down (and therefor fast) as Dave’s mobile rivers, with the big advantage of not being restricted to several feeds, but rather synching with whatever sources users have syndicated in their Bloglines-account. this basically means that users dont’ have to double-read posts when using desktop- and mobile platforms, which is a great feature.

as announced yesterday, Bloglines recently integrated Skweezer into their mobile reader. Skweezer is a proxy-service for shrinking websites to fit on small screens of handhelds and mobile phones. this is a great feature, as it allows blog-readers to follow links to normal web-pages without the usual hassle. besides optimizing html, Skweezer downscales images (or disables them at all) and translates text to 13 languages. the screenshots below were taken on Opera Mini on a Nokia 6630 and show Bloglines’ startscreen (left), feedlist (middle) and a version of this blog rendered by Skweezer (right).