January 28, 2008

A Better Email Notification Service For You

Here we grow! You can now get email notifications of new posts from Feedburner, which Google bought for $100 million US in June 2007. As usual, Google made the service better and cheaper. The purchase shows how relevant blogging has become. As of today Feedburner burns blog feeds for 1,322,961 feeds for 743,793 publishers (see statistics).

Growing Pains
There's no seamless way to transfer your email addresses from the old service which was discontinued last month. For your protection, anti-spam laws require that you opt-in again. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Please resubscribe by clicking on the links below
During the transition, you may have missed
What Happened to Zookoda
Australia-based Zookoda was terrific. A few months ago, they were purchased by controversial PayPerPost (now called IZEA), which pays bloggers to write posts that look real but are actually advertising (see Polluting the Blogosphere in BusinessWeek). A bad sign. Service did not improve.

Zookoda couldn't cope with spammers. On December 21, 2007, they suspended all broadcasts to make major changes. There was no advance warning or exemption for honest bloggers. Like me :(

Zookoda restored service on Jan 9 but there have been serious mixups. Content went to the wrong subscribers. I stopped using Zookoda last week after Spanish content was sent out.

Plan B
I'd been experimenting with another email service: Feedburner, which is now owned by Google. (Aside: my blog is hosted by Blogger, which Google bought in 2003, enhanced, and relaunched in 2007. Traffic is tracked by Google Analytics.) The service is very reliable but less flexible. Unfortunately, there's currently no way to move the mailing list from Zookoda.

New readers can now only subscribe via Feedburner. What about existing readers? You can
Again, my sincere apologies for the inconvenience.

2 comments:

  1. Or, you can use FeedBlitz, which offers all the customization you'll need and a self-serve import facvility that will automatically repermission your list as part of the import process.

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  2. Thanks for the suggestion, Phil. I did test FeedBlitz and the offering looks good.

    Since my blogs are noncommercial, I don't want readers to see any advertising. The free FeedBlitz service embeds ads and the paid service costs money. Both options are fair, but not what I was looking for.

    I've sent an email to all active subscribers encouraging them to switch to the new notification service. I'm not eager to ask them to switch again ...

    ReplyDelete