I manage feeds (using FeedBurner) for three blogs – Feld Thoughts (my stuff), Mobius Venture Capital (headlines from our companies), and Thoughts in Random Patterns (the blog of the most incredible woman in the world – she told me not to be so smarmy, but I can’t help myself.)
I’ve wanted to put the Mobius headlines on my site for a while, but I didn’t feel like figuring out how to deal with it. Fortunately, FeedBurner did it for me – today they announced BuzzBoost – yafs (“yet another free service”) which – in addition to being super cool – shows off how easy it is to put together stuff now that their Feed Awareness API is out.
If you click through to Feld Thoughts and page down once, you’ll see a sidebar called “Mobius News” with five headlines. Click through any of them and you are at the Mobius Venture Capital Headlines feed. Subscribe to the feed if you desire. Click on the title at the top and you are at the Mobius Venture Capital site. Oh – and if you click on the “Mobius News” title – you’ll go straight through to the full headlines list (not just the top 5).
One simple line of HTML that FeedBurner automagically generates for me. All the content is live – as the Mobius headlines change, so will the list on my blog. I’ve got control over a bunch of variables if I want (and – I imagine after this gets used some, there will be more) but I kept it simple and just did everything within FeedBurner.
Fred Wilson had some content from his blog ripped off today. Michael Parekh had some content ripped off also (same dudes). That sucks. And – the problem is going to get worse. However, there are lots of legitimate people who want to incorporate content from their friends’ blogs (or other blogs they control). With FeedBurner’s BuzzBoost, I control how someone else would format my content and all the links click back to my site. So – I now have a safe and easy way for having my friends (e.g. good people) republish my content.