FeedBurner has been busy analyzing, publicizing, optimizing and monetizing your feeds since 2004, and in that time, we've seen our fair share of feed traffic. In fact, we see billions of hits from feed traffic per week, and we watch this data carefully for trends and opportunities to improve what we do in making sure your feed content is delivered as quickly as possible, as accurately as possible, no matter what its destination might be.
Today we are making an improvement that we think will serve our publishers better by making our service more compatible with search engines that crawl feeds.
When we started the service, one thing we were not sure of at the time was how the feed reading ecosystem would treat the links we rewrite in order to give you statistics on how many people click on your feed items.
For instance, on the previous post in this blog, we change the link in the feed item for "FeedBurner Terms of Service Update" from
http://adsenseforfeeds.blogspot.com/2009/08/feedburner-terms-of-service-update.html
to
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/MQiv/~3/Z8Es5QuvgEI/feedburner-terms-of-service-update.html
which sends the browser to that original URL, but allows us to first track the click.
As a technical detail, we rewrote these links with a code of "302 Temporary Redirect" which tells the browser or consuming service that the redirect is not permanent, and thus it would need to be read every time.
As of today we are changing this to be a "301 Permanent Redirect" because we've looked at the traffic enough to tell that there some benefit to changing this to a "301 Permanent Redirect" - in that some search engines that index the feeds themselves will consider these to be additional links that should be used in determining the popularity of your site. This is the same way that "URL shortener" services send traffic and get treated by search engines, so we feel that this is consistent with the way that content is distributed today. This update should not change the number of clicks that come to your site from your feed nor should it significantly affect the number of clicks FeedBurner tracks for you.
What do you need to do? Nothin'. Nada. Just keep burning your feeds from FeedBurner or your AdSense account in AdSense for feeds, and we will keep working hard to ensure your content is as accessible as possible – now, hopefully even more so.
Posted by Steve Olechowski - Product Manager, AdSense for feeds and FeedBurner
September 30th, 2009 | Uncategorized | Comments Off
Posted by Zack Lynch
Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn have joined forces to publish "Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women" which was released earlier this month. I just ordered my copy. Here is their reasoning why.
IN THE 19TH CENTURY, the paramount moral challenge was slavery. In the 20th century, it was totalitarianism. In this century, it is the brutality inflicted on so many women and girls around the globe: sex trafficking, acid attacks, bride burnings and mass rape.
Yet if the injustices that women in poor countries suffer are of paramount importance, in an economic and geopolitical sense the opportunity they represent is even greater. Women hold up half the sky, in the words of a Chinese saying, yet thats mostly an aspiration: in a large slice of the world, girls are uneducated and women marginalized, and its not an accident that those same countries are disproportionately mired in poverty and riven by fundamentalism and chaos. Theres a growing recognition among everyone from the World Bank to the U.S. militarys Joint Chiefs of Staff to aid organizations like CARE that focusing on women and girls is the most effective way to fight global poverty and extremism. Thats why foreign aid is increasingly directed to women. The world is awakening to a powerful truth: Women and girls arent the problem; theyre the solution."
I couldn't agree more.
September 24th, 2009 | Uncategorized | Comments Off
Posted by Zack Lynch
A few weeks ago I participated in a day long discussion at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto around the topic of When Everything is Programmable. Lots of very interesting scenarios and viewpoints were shared. For my part, I stuck to the theme of our emerging neurosociety. Towards the end of the day each of us were asked to write up a 10 year scenario focused on our area of expertise. Jake Dunagan, IFTF's Director of Technology Horizons Program and fellow neurofuturist joined me in sketching out this scenario which touches on a whole set of emerging issues. This is not meant to be comprehensive, more so a quick sketch we put together in 45 minutes.
September 13, 2019 President Signs NINA (Neuro Information Nondiscrimination Act)
Inspired by the GINA (Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act) legislation passed in 2008, NINA might include areas such as:
-Explicit right to cognitive liberty, brain privacy
-Bans discrimination in hiring based on neuroimaging profile
-Bans all local, state 'drug vaccine' programs
-Bans 'neuroprofiling' for travel and attendance at public events
-Subsidizes accelerated learning with neuroenablement technologies
-Legalizes use of neuroenablers
-Bans denial of health coverage based on neuroprofile
-Bans cosmetic memory erasure
The scenario is being accelerated by the development of more sophisticated imaging technologies, neuroinformatic analysis algorithms, neurofeedback technologies, research into neuroplasticity, drug vaccine, neuropharma and neurodevice R&D.
The reason this scenario was seen as important to sketch out was that right now we have a whole host of technologies that are emerging without an effective policy infrastructure. There will be severe unintended consequences as technologies accelerate across a wide variety of enabling disciplines and national governments may eventually need to step in to protect their populations and their basic human rights.
September 21st, 2009 | Uncategorized | Comments Off
Posted by Zack Lynch
Big brain thinkers are aggregating in Berlin over next few days for the Decade of the Mind V Conference. The three themes are Education (how neuroscience can aid educational research and policy); Social Policy (how neuroeconomics can inform public policy); and Health (neurotech developments for brain related illness).
September 10th, 2009 | Uncategorized | Comments Off
Posted by Zack Lynch
In Chapter Nine, Perception Shift, we explore the societal implications of a time when people across all walks of life intentionally choose to use neurotechnologies to influence their mood, senses and memories. By subtly influencing one's mental self - improving cognitive clarity, extending physical sensations, expanding emotional well being - we will ultimately begin to change how we perceive daily events. In short, society will experience a perception shift. There are profound ethical, legal and societal issues with moving down this pathway, but it does indeed seem like this is a likely path that many may take as we travel deeper into the emerging neurosociety.
A recent article in the Prospect written by David Edmonds, The Age of Enhancement, highlights the complexities that arise when considering the societal impact of conscious mental enhancement, "At the heart of the debate there remains unease about tampering with the very things that make humans human. And while we are becoming accustomed to some varieties of enhancement, our capacity to manipulate not just our bodies and our cognitive faculties, but potentially also our core emotions, is taking us into a world of dizzyingly new options."
September 4th, 2009 | Uncategorized | Comments Off
