Media Relations & SEO PR Blog Observes Day of Silence for Virginia Tech


Posted: April 29th, 2007 | By: Steve Mullen | Filed under: EndGame PR Site News | No Comments

On Monday, April 30, 2007, the blogosphere will observe a day of silence to remember the victims of the Virginia Tech massacre. EndGame Public Relations and the Media Relations & SEO PR Blog are participating in this observation.

One Day Blog Silence

New Pinging Service and New Blog Search Engine Launched by Same Company


Posted: April 28th, 2007 | By: Steve Mullen | Filed under: Social Media News | 2 Comments

A company out of Tel Aviv, Israel called aggreg, ltd. is having a busy April.

On April 18 aggreg brought their blog search engine, Strategicboard, out of beta and fully launched it. The company claims its search engine is unique because its goal is to be free of spam blogs. They invite users to submit addresses of blogs that are less than legitimate for whatever reason. Those blogs are removed from the search engine, presumably after being reviewed. An excerpt from their news release:

Strategicboard’s seeks to provide the highest quality blogs and feeds for its users. One of the company’s motto’s is “real blogs by real people for real people.” To achieve that goal, Strategicboard has in place editorial techniques and automated processes that exclude spammers from the search engine. Strategicboard also invites users to report suspicious blogs using the “Spam Free” report tool.

Also in April, today to be precise, they launched a new blog update pinging service called King Ping. This is a new competitor to Ping-o-Matic, a site that allows you to “ping” multiple search engines and directories to let them know that your blog or website has updated information. From my quick review of the site, it looks like the only different is that feed aggregators and small search engines can sign up for the service and be included, saving them to trouble of having to do the work of looking for updates themselves. Here’s an excerpt from THAT news release:

What really sets King Ping apart, however, is it doesn’t just provide a service for bloggers. Aggregators and small search engines can also make their lives easier thanks to the new site. Here’s why: most aggregators have to check blog updates listed on their indexes manually which is time consuming and usually causes them to miss fresh updates. With King Ping, aggregators can gain instant access to notifications about blog updates. This is the first time such a service has been offered.

I’ll be honest, I haven’t given either of these sites a very thorough once-over, but they’re worth knowing about, and they might be worth checking out.

EndGame Public Relations Produces Second Episode of Fighting Back Podcast


Posted: April 27th, 2007 | By: Steve Mullen | Filed under: Client News, EndGame PR News, Podcasts | No Comments

The second episode of the podcast series EndGame PR is producing for Fight SMA and FighterMom is out in the “podosphere”. The podcast focus is inspirational stories about people or families fighting against serious or incurable diseases. Fight SMA is an international nonprofit organization working to accelerate a cure for spinal muscular atrophy. FighterMom is a Fight SMA program that assists mothers who have become activists fighting any serious or incurable disease affecting their children. The latest episode features an interview with Edibell Stone. Mrs. Stone and much of her immediate family has Myotonic Muscular Distrophy.

Click the player below to give it a listen!

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Be sure to catch each episode as it’s released by using your favorite feed reader to subscribe to the Fighting Back Podcast Feed.

We recently launched the EndGame Public Relations Podcast Production service. Prior to becoming a PR professional I spent eight years as a journalist .. most as a radio news anchor and reporter. My podcasts reflect that experience, and generally sound like an NPR report. Sorry to sound like a commercial, but please check out the service. Podcasting can be a powerful business tool.

Review of Online RSS Feed Generators


Posted: April 23rd, 2007 | By: Steve Mullen | Filed under: Recommended Sites, SEO PR Tactics, Social Media Tactics | 12 Comments

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds are great to have on your site for a number of reasons. For one thing, they allow your visitors to easily keep up with new content. There are plenty of SEO and social media benefits as well.

Most blogging software makes it very easy to make feeds available for your readers. The problem, however, is that creating a feed for a regular website involves dealing with code. I wanted to make a feed for the EndGame Public Relations News page, which features news releases I’ve written for my clients. I can write the code, but I really don’t want to. So, I set out looking for a site that would do everything for me and not charge anything. Below is a review of the best and worst (in no particular order) of the free services I found using my news page as a test site. At the bottom I give my “Best Bets“. There are probably others that I missed. Feel free to tell me about them in comments!

IceRocket
In addition to being a blog search engine, Icerocket offes a free online RSS builder. I actually used this service for quite a while. It’s simple to set up and offers a number of features, such as adding your logo to the feed and including a link for comments. There’s no option to import an existing feed or automatically build a feed. The big problem I’ve had with IceRocket is that over the last couple of weeks the site has gone down a few times for long periods.

Ponyfish
Another online business with a very odd name, this site offers a system that automatically builds an RSS feed or you. Just enter the page from which you want to build, click on the links you want to include, and presto .. RSS feed. You don’t have to sign up to create a simple feed that doesn’t include descriptions. However, if you don’t register your feed will only update every eight hours. If you sign up for a free account your feed will update every four hours. The main problem I have is that you’re unable to add link descriptions with a free account. They do have paid options that allow you to add descriptions and edit link titles. It also doesn’t appear to be possible to add a logo to your feed.

Feedity
This service is very similar to Ponyfish, except that it’s even easier to use. There’s no option to sign up for an account, free or not. You just enter the URL of the website with elements for your feed, and Feedity automatically pulls out the content. I’m not sure how it works, to be honest, but it worked perfectly with my test page. It even skipped the link to my news archives that was right below the news release list. Feedity also claims to update your feed with new content in near real time. Unfortunately, like Ponyfish, it has the downside of not adding link descriptions or a logo in the feed.

RSSPad
This service from PRWeb has some promise. Like IceRocket, you manually enter links and descriptions to create your feed. If you have an existing feed, you can import it. RSSPad is still in beta, which means you’ll find some issues now and then. I found a problem with the items in a feed I imported not being ordered correctly, but after I emailed customer service they fixed it quickly and courteously. Since then I haven’t had any problems. The huge benefit of this service is that your feed is listed on RSSPad’s “Recent Feeds” page, and whenever you update your feed it jumps to the top. The Google Pagerank on that page is five, which means Google has decided it’s a fairly important page and will be back to index it frequently. As a result, my feed is now ranking higher than the EndGame Public Relations home page for some of my key searches!

RSSpect
If you don’t mind a little code insertion, RSSPect seems like a decent service. The system involves inserting code on your website to indicate item titles, descriptions, and so on. RSSpect’s software then reads the code and builds your feed on it. This allows you to include everything you want to include, but it seems time consuming to me. I didn’t go through the process of including the markups, so I don’t know for sure how well the service works.

FeedYes
FeedYes works in a similar way to Ponyfish. You enter your webpage URL and click the items you want to include. The problem I had was that it didn’t work as WELL as Ponyfish. FeedYes missed several items on my news page that I would have preferred to include, and there didn’t appear to be a way to fix the error.

Feedburner
Feedburner doesn’t actually have an RSS generator, although why is beyond me. It seems they’d be very well served to create one or buy someone like Ponyfish. What Feedburner does very well is HOST your feed. You sign up, enter the URL of your existing feed, and you’re ready to go. When I first learned about the service, I didn’t understand the point. If I have a feed already, why do I need a host? The answer is that Feedburner allows you to include many, many extras on your feed, and they help you promote it. No matter who you use to build your feed, I recommend hosting at Feedburner. I currently host four feed there.

So, who is the best? Here are the Media Relations & SEO PR Blog Best Bets:

Best Overall RSS Feed Generation Site: The SEO benefits put RSSPad over the top. I wasn’t happy with the buggy feed item ordering, but that concern was eased by a quick response by customer service. If you don’t want to risk dealing with a site that’s in beta, I recommend IceRocket.

Best “Quick and Easy” Feed Generation Site: You can’t beat Feedity’s quick and easy RSS generation. The feeds lack descriptions, but you can create one with a whole mess of feed items in less than a minute. Ponyfish is a very close second in this category.

Happy syndicating!

PRWeb Claims its One Millionth Podcast Download


Posted: April 20th, 2007 | By: Steve Mullen | Filed under: Podcasts, Social Media News | No Comments

They didn’t actually mentioned the name of the person who put them over the top, but PRWeb announced today that they’ve had more than one million downloads from their podcasting service. The number, according to the news distribution service, is actually now at 1.3 million … but who’s counting? In addition to its news release distribution and other services, PRWeb will produce a podcast version of your news release for you…

Since moving to a paid platform in December, the PRWebPodcast ™ service is now available to customers with press releases at any distribution level. PRWeb users can now choose to discuss their news in a 5-minute podcast interview or a more in-depth 10- to 20-minute interview. PRWeb Podcast episodes are available in three audio formats, including MP3, OGG, and the iPod and iTunes friendly M4a format.

I love PRWeb, but I’d rather you signed up for the EndGame Public Relations podcasting service. Nevermind that I’ve been so busy with client work that I haven’t yet built out the page on my website that describes the service…

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