Over the last few weeks I have been working on working on a blog about broadband telecommunications for the Blandin Foundation (www.blandinonbroadband.org). Griff Wigley of Wigley Associates (http://wigleyandassociates.com) has been helping; he’s a blog coach. It’s been a fun project.

In the process I have learned about a very cool tool – Feedburner (www.feedburner.com), a service that can supercharge your RSS feed, which helps you to distribute your content and analyze subscribers.

Here’s a mini-refresher: an RSS feed is like a ticker tape that gives you the headlines or highlights of your favorite web sites. If you have a web site it’s nice to offer people the option of subscribing to a feed to get your updates. If you have a blog with a service such as Blogger (www.blogger.com) or WordPress (www.wordpress.com) you can easily offer an RSS feed. Feedburner can make that feed better.

My favorite thing about Feedburner is that they offer you the option to publish your RSS feed via email. So when you post a new article to your blog anyone who has signed up to receive email notification will get a message with the title of your blog and will be able to easily click through to your site for more information.

A couple of weeks ago I sent Byte of personal homepages. Bill in St. Paul sent me another great personal homepage tool (http://www.protopage.com). Visit the site for a great example of a web site that broadcasts RSS feeds from other web sites, which is another good use of RSS feeds. You can learn more here: http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/publishers/fbemail  

Finally I want to welcome my new friends from Walker Minnesota! And I hope that those of us in Minnesota make it through the next snow storm. For those outside MN, we got about a foot of snow last weekend and they are predicting the same or more over the next few days.