Library clips

Thought I’d take a look at FeedBlitz the publisher/subscriber email service that I use as a publisher as an email subscription option, and to my surprise they have fine tuned their service, plus offering a few other bonus features.

For the subscriber you enter a feed or an OPML and you will get that content delivered to you in a daily email.

Delivery

Modify a subscription by filter in/out content, and get a daily digest per subscription, instead of an email per post (that would be messy in email). You can also subscribe to an OPML.

What I like about it is that at the top of the email are links to the content for each feed you are subscribed to, when you click on a link it will take you to that spot in the email where the content for the feed is displayed. Then their are links to each of the items in a feed, clicking on a story will again take you to that spot in the email where the content fot that story is displayed…plus if the feed is full-text, well that’s what you get.

Simply Headlines has a similar email delivery but doesn’t have full-text.

Footer flare

When viewing a blog post delivered by FeedBlitz to your email, there are a few footers displayed at the end of each post, sometimes called flare.

Email to a friend - click on this to email this post, I’ve also got this on my Feedburner FeedFlare

View comments - links to the comments spot on my post…I must see if I can find this flare for my feed

Track comments - this allows you to track any new comments made to this post.
(Not sure if it is tracking my RSS post comments feed or it is creating one itself)

Search - this grabs the terms from the categories/tags applied to this post and enters them into a Google search box. From here you can edit the search terms or simply click submit, which it then displays related posts in the blogosphere according to these terms. Not sure if you can limit this to just posts in your blog.
On the actual blog post, people usual point to Technorati Tags for posts on the same topic, and even Sphere for more accurate related posts.

Metrics

Get metrics from your subscribers

Add-ons

Add a subscription via the Google Toolbar and a right-click menu

Related feeds

Based on what they call the subscription web, you can find related feeds to your subscription set based on other FeedBlitz subscribers via a added on service called FeedAdvisor, Improbulus has an indepth analysis.

Here are some related feeds to my blog.

OPML Reading List

Just like many RSS Readers, FeedBlitz has email import/export, but that’s just the beginning as it also allows you to subscribe to a dynamic OPML Reading List, see my past post.
This means that you are not subscribing to a feed, and you are not bulk importing lots of feeds, you are actually subscribing to someone else’s list of feeds. If that person deletes/adds a feed from their list, it will naturally be deleted/added from your version.

It gets better, FeedBlitz not only lets you subscribe to OPML, it lets you create an OPML so you can let others subscribe to it, just like a feed. In regards to OPML, FeedBlitz does for email what BlogBridge does for RSS.

Widgets

Directly related to creating OPML Reading List are Widgets where you can host and promote your Reading List for people to look at and subscribe, check it out.

The widget lists all your feeds with an email subscribe icon and the feed URL next to each subscription, at the end of the list there is an OPML icon and an email icon to subscribe to the OPML in an RSS Reader or email…see below.

Check out the Feedburner alternative.