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I guess it pays to get the Big Guns involved

by Steven Hodson on January 4, 2009 · Comments

BattleShip

The tech blogosphere is littered with posts giving the big boys of blogging a slap around or chain yanking over their popularity and presumed power but today proved that there is something to the A-List power after all.

I wrote earlier over at The Inquisitr about the complaints that are going on about Feedburner and Google’s apparent lack of interest. The basic back story is that in a pile on that started with Steve Gillmor, spread to Dave Winer and beyond and how Feedburner was in danger of becoming irrelevant. At this point per usual, nothing had been heard from Google – officially or otherwise.

Then Chris Baskind wrote an excellent piece on the problems with the service that then got shared by Louis Gray and as a result showed up in FriendFeed. It was at this point that Matt Cutts of Google fame got involved with the discussion which you can read here but the main point he made was this

Just a few thoughts: - I’ve heard a few people mention complaints about latency recently and I just passed on a couple of those threads to other people at Google. Fair feedback, and it’s appreciated. - Duncan Riley mused that FeedBurner is more about advertising these days, but that’s Duncan’s take. Have you seen any statement from Google that backs up Duncan’s opinion? I’m not aware of any statement by Google to that effect. - Dave Winer worries about outsourcing feed burning to Google, but with FeedBurner’s MyBrand service (which is now free, courtesy of Google), you keep your feeds on your own domain. Do a Google search for [master feed domain] to see Danny Sullivan’s excellent write-up on how to do this. This is how I handle the feeds on my blog, and I can leave FeedBurner any time I want just by where feeds.mattcutts.com points to, so I remain in control of my feed’s destiny. :) - Matt Cutts

So you see it does pay to get the A-List boys involved because contrary to popular belief they  actually are the only ones that people like Google listen; or respond, to. The rest of us are just fodder for their ad food chain. Now whether anything will come of this is still to be seen but as Chris Baskind said in the FriendFeed thread

Yes, Matt — thanks for Google’s first peek over the top of the trench. ;-) - Chris Baskind

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Tagged as: A-List, FeedBurner, Google

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  • That's an interesting little case study. Thanks for sharing this Steven. Knowing Google's culture they probably do read a bit more than we think (not just A-listers). I bet when you mention Google here their communications team at the very least reads it.
  • As nice as it of you to say I doubt very much that myself or WinExtra appears anywhere on Google's radar :) - but one can always dream :)
  • I find that Matt Cutts does a fairly good job of engaging around the Web wherever there is discussion. If you look at who he follows on FriendFeed (http://friendfeed.com/mattcutts/subscriptions), you'll see it's a fairly narrow number of folks, so it was more likely he would see the item from Chris Baskind which I shared on my feed than natively. I can't say I know why he's following me vs. anybody else, but that's the way it is.

    As for being a big gun, I should run back to my e-mail archives with you and me, sir. We're the same. Sometimes people pay attention, and many times... not.
  • One of the reason he would follow you is because you have my friend become a voice of social media. As for you and me being on the same level (so to speak) that may have been the case at one point but you have definitely become more of a prominent blogger than I have. That is a good thing by the way and one I am very happy to see because you do bring a lot of value to the table. Me - I just get cranky :)
  • Hey, I enjoy my dose of Hodson. For example, I enjoyed http://bit.ly/3DAtwl even though I didn't know who your wrote it about. In fact, it was kind of more fun because I didn't know who you wrote it about. :)
  • wow .. thanks Matt.
  • Now if we could get the big guns to say something about the never ending Gmail Beta.
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