Tired of hanging all day in front of the screen, juggling with Bloglines, newsreaders, Kinja, Osama´s recent Podcast-RSS and his new Atom-feeds, switching from Alan to MadPixBiz and to Gay and Lesbian Stock Photography, from Bahar and Will to the Stock Photo Press Release Cemetery? Tired that your sys admin and your boss do know what you are reading during working hours?
FeedBlitz is a very young
service that lets you receive entries of special selected blogs via
email. Your email is always on, your browser or newsreader may be not.
You can even read them on your cell phone or PDA.
Doesn´t sound too revolutionary? FeedBlitz already is today what the old service of Bloglet never became: reliable. You can even setup anonymous accounts (check "Private" in your
profile), so the owner of the blog doesn´t know who subscribed to the
blog.
Next, as a blog writer, you don´t have to hand over your own blog´s
password -- as you were required using Bloglet -- because FeedBlitz is
working with simple XML-feeds. I´m surprised that Steve Rubel is still using Bloglet.
The best for your boss (or his boss) however might be that your
company doesn´t leave these little nasty referrers anymore at the blog
you (or your boss, or your PR company) are just reading, like:
- intranet.seattle.gettyimages.com/OnePlaceHome.asp
- host80.uk.corbis.com
(that guy had been workig on a saturday -- not to bad for an employee -- reading this old message on Photographer Patrick Riviere)
- outbound-nyc.gettyimages.com
- intranet.corbis.com/About_Corbis/Snapshot/details_0805.asp
(the headline at the top is too short to display the full URL)
- outbound-emea.gettyimages.com
- host9.nyc.edelman.com
(a NYC-based PR company)
- etcetcetc.
It´s also not too bright if those dump blog writers observe that --
just at 09.00 AM local time in Seattle, London and New York -- these
referrers are coming in.
This might sound to your boss like: he/she went to work, turned the
computer on with a cup of coffee in the hand, started reading blogs,
ended up snorting with laughter and went home to file a resume and CV
to another company.
This might sound to the PR company of your company: heck, we have a
problem. Not with the employees and not with the performance of all the
bosses, but with this company at all.
Next, it´s not too bright to google for "Corbis IPO" or similar
incredulous things, or even "xyzcompany lawsuit" or "mycompany sold to
yourcompany", directly from your desk, if you are working in a big or
mid-sized photo agency or PR company. Referrers are kind of omnipresent.
Furthermore, it´s not too smart to download blog content directly to
your computer and save it to your local hard disk in a directory called
"file///E:/MyCompany/Projects/Competitor/Kill..." as a document for the
presentation next morning.
Long story short, sign up for FeedBlitz
using the button to the right "Subscribe StockPhotoTalk!", create a
Google account, set the preferences there to HTML-mail, let FeedBlitz
mail you all the stories from this site to your Google account, then
you can copy, change, extract, google and even delete the stuff just as
you like it.
And, best of all: if you sign up for the Press Release Cemetery (there is a special button for that particular feed on that site: "Subscribe the Cemetery!"), then you´ll receive all the press releases for free (Link 1; Link 2) in your email!
And, if you are a weird person, you can even sign up for MadPixBiz (again, there is a special button for that particular feed on that site: "Subscribe MadPixBiz!").
The frequency of posts over there is very low (who in the world has
consistently the time to write such bizarre stuff?). But the quality...
.
However, with an email subscription you won´t be able to read the comments here or see the track backs.
Finally, if you don´t empty your browser´s cache, then the monkey at the top won´t shake his head.