A Bloggerside Chat with Feedster’s Devine Feedmaster, Betsy Devine

Feedster is one of the most powerful online tools available to PR pros interested in Micro Persuasion (integrating Weblogs into traditional campaigns). The search engine indexes over a million blog posts on an hourly basis. It is a powerful tool that can be used to monitor online discussions about clients, competitors and more.

Micro Persuasion recently conducted an email interview with Feedster’s Feedmaster, Betsy Devine. In the interview Ms. Devine discuses how PR pros can make best use of Feedster and how she goes about selecting the coveted “Feedster Feed of the Day.” You can read more about Feedster over at the Story of Feedster blog.

MP: How many blogs and/or feeds does Feedster now crawl? How does it differ from Google or Blogdex?

DEVINE: We have almost 600,000 feeds in our database - 582,236 as I write this - probably more when you read it. The great majority of those feeds come from people's personal Weblogs. Newsfeeds have just been taking off this past year, and corporate blogging is also on a steep uptrend.



Feedster is an RSS search tool, much more like Google than it is like Blogdex. Feedster is like Blogdex because we both look at blog data and metadata. Blogdex looks at what people are talking about by tracking the URLs they link to. Feedster looks at what people are talking about by tracking the words and phrases they use. People use Feedster to find blogs and newsfeeds that talk about stuff they care about.



Our most obvious use is a free "clipping service." You can run a fast Feedster search on your name or your product--find out what people are saying today, or what they were saying more than a year ago. You can subscribe to your favorite searches as RSS feeds or get them delivered by email if you prefer.



People use us to capture the sense of blogbuzz. You can use metadata to do some intriguing stuff--for example, in December, 2003, we were tracking what people said about "Saddam Hussein" in English, in French, in German, in Spanish, etc.



So I guess I could sum up the difference between Feedster and Blogdex this way--if you want to know what's hot, check the links at Blogdex. If you want to know what people say about stuff that matters to *you*, use Feedster search.



MP: Every day you select one blog and/or site to feature as the Feed of the Day (FOTD). What makes a good FOTD?



DEVINE: I look for the "Wow!" sites--something timely or new or unusual and of high quality. I want Feedster users to keep on clicking that FOTD link every day, with a feeling of anticipation. I rarely pick a blog that's already famous--something like Scobleizer--because people don't need me to point them to Scobleizer. On the other hand, when Robert Scoble came out with Channel 9--it made Feed of the Day because it was excellent but not yet a brand name.



I have a long list of cool sites I want to pick someday, but I still check out a wide range of bloggers and search feeds every morning in case there's some great new thing that isn't on the list. Then, if I didn't discover some feed just has to be chosen *today*, I start hunting around in my list.



I test feeds with a "Yes" question and a "No" question. Does this feed have a good recent top post? (The answer has to be yes.) Is this feed very similar to some recent pick? (The answer has to be no.) When a good feed passes that test, it's Feed of the Day.



MP: What is the mix between homegrown feeds you select and "corporate"-sponsored feeds? Are you increasingly seeing more of the latter?

DEVINE: Most feeds are the homegrown love children of one person. (Ow, mixed metaphors.) Newsfeeds and blogs by paid writers are newer and rarer. How much rarer? It's rising fast, but I'd guess maybe 1% of the total. Here's a feedsterized justification of that guess: When Google filed its IPO, just about every pundit or bizblog talked about it--of course, a lot of homegrown bloggers did as well. On May 1 and 2 Feedster indexed about 270,000 posts. Of these, only 3,500 mentioned Google.



So, even though I pick more homegrown bloggers than corporate feeds, the disproportion out there is even bigger.



MP: Are you seeing an influx in pitches from PR pros? If so, what kind of advice can you offer to PR people who yearn to have their site earn an FOTD distinction?



DEVINE: Yes--I'm seeing more pitches from all kinds of people--and that's great. The more suggestions I get to go look at new sites, the more interesting feeds I have to choose from.



The basic test for a possible FOTD winner: a site we'd like to show somebody else, right now. Just about any other rule I can think of has been broken by some former Feed of the Day.

One unbreakable rule: the site can't be feed of the day if it has no (RSS) feed. I once got a pitch for a non-blog website promoting a small-town store. The site was cute, but even if it had been ten times as cute as it was, it had no feed.



So, if you know a site that ought to be Feed of the Day, just send me the URL--plus maybe a few sentences on what makes it special.



MP: How might PR pros use Feedster as search tool?

DEVINE: I've been very impressed by the ways webbiz people use Feedster searches for their own PR. Amy Wohl preps for speeches by subscribing to Feedster searches on her topic.



Ross Karchner tracks his product's name in Feedster because he can respond quickly "to feedback, complaints, and criticism earned me a lot of early good will and word of mouth."



Stuart Henshall uses Feedster search to get back up to speed on his hot topics after a vacation--it's also a good way to get in the swing with new interests.



PR pros could use Feedster to measure their success. For example, if 10 blogs mentioned "gazingas" on May 1 but 10,000 blogs mentioned "gazingas" on June 1, that's useful to know if you do PR for gazingas. Rick Heller did some excellent measurement work using Feedster search in the early primary season.



MP: How might Feedster work in conjunction with Google?



DEVINE: Definitely, use Google as well as Feedster. Google's data tends to be older than Feedster's--they crawl most blogposts within a month after they publish--but Google searches the static web in addition to what Feedster covers. I subscribe to both Google Alerts and Google News Alerts. If something gets out there in Google, it's really public--so I want to know about it when it happens.

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