Posted by Fox on July 23, 2007 at 5:33 PM

I've not had a great deal of exposure to news feeds or news readers. I'm not a consumer of feeds, and as a blogger I only have a few subscribers to the feeds that I provide on my various blogs (just 27 current subscribers to the SMS text Guide feed).

If you're not familar with feeds, read What is a Blog Feed?

So how come a feed service makes it on to my list of Essential Bloggers Tools?

First, feedburner is free. Second, it makes it incredibly easy for anyone to subscribe to my feed regardless of which feed reader or news reader they prefer to use. Take a look at the feed for The UK Bloggers Guide and note the drop down list the popular feed readers available.

Anything that helps people subscribe can only be good, right?

Now, most hosted blog applications will automatically provide a feed of your blog, you simply have to make sure you have a link to it included on your blog, but what really rocks about feedburner is another free service they call FeedFlare.

This is the Feedflare I use on The UK Bloggers Guide.

You'll notice this at the bottom of each of my posts and articles.

What is FeedFlare?

FeedFlare enables you to EASILY add interactivity to all of your blog posts and articles by pasting a small piece of javascript in to your blog template. Once pasted in to your template it'll automatically appear in every post. Worth noting that it does takes a few minutes to appear.

In my FeedFlare I've given readers the ability to email the article to another person, digg it, stumble it, add it to the del.icio.us bookmark service, submit it to reddit or simply add it to their favourites.

This is my own personal preference, but FeedFlare has a massive list of interactive functions you can add to your blog posts.

So, feedburner makes it on to my list of Essential Blog Tools because I really like the FeedFlare service. Once I have a hundred or so subscribers to my feed, I'll take more of an interest in the news feed service as well.

If you haven't already got a feedburner account, I highly recommend you do it today. It's free.

Link : feedburner.com

See Also : Don't forget to use feedburner.com's PingShot