| To 'burn' a feed is to use
FeedBurner's
service.
Here's the process: You create a news feed in .xml (in our tool
pages for instance), then upload that file to your website. You
visit FeedBurner, enter your .xml filename, and click the button.
FeedBurner returns with a unique url that contains your feed.
Pros:
- Your version .91 feed that you created is now accessible in
all feed formats including Atom (RSS 0.90, 0.91, 0.92, 0.93,
0.94, 1.0, 2.0, and Atom).
- You can publicize that unique url, which is also viewable in
a webpage and looks like a blog.
- Feedburner checks your original .xml file every 1/2 hour for
updates and automatically updates its file if you've updated
yours.
- If you publicize the unique url FeedBurner gives you, you
will have access to stats (highly valuable as you know).
Cons:
- If you have a site that already enjoys a 3-7 google page
rank, advertising a feed at another url does little to improve
your rank (of course it won't hurt it, but it won't help it
much either). If your site has a page rank of 3-7 we suggest
keeping your feed on your own site - more sites linking into
your feed, your feed cross-linking within and updating
consistently, makes your site appear more valuable vs. people
reading your feed on FeedBurner's unique url for you.
UNLESS, of course, your site and feed is all about Blogs, RSS
files and/or traffic generation and promotion using Blogs and
RSS. In that case having outgoing links from FeedBurner would
be highly beneficial. (related content)
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