Interview with Eric Olson of Feedburner.com (text)

Eric is a glutton for punishment. He accepted not one, but TWO interview requests while at Podcast Academy. Here’s the text interview:
Tell me about your job at FeedBurner.
My official title is Business Development Associate but I’m really in publisher relations. I collect feedback from our publisher universe and help turn it into reality as in, “this is a great idea. We should figure out how to do this.” I talk to engineering about what publishers want to see and what they love about our service. I reach out to the user base and ask what do you want to see? What aren’t we doing well? What are we doing well? I check in with other publishers who aren’t using FeedBurner. I show them what they can use to help their potential and current subscribers like the BrowserFriendly and FeedFlare services.
FeedFlare is great and has an open API so you can create your own custom Flare. You’ve got two feeds? You can cross-promote within themselves. You publish a book? You can make a FeedFlare that says check out my book. It’s very helpful and it’s free.
Also, I should note that we don’t lock you in. We believe that, as a publisher, it’s your content and your subscribers and we are just there to help. We’re very big on that. We make it really easy to leave the service should you ever be dissatisfied.
What brings you out to events?
What I love about events is that I get to meet all the publishers that use FeedBurner, from Reuters to pro bloggers to smaller bloggers like myself. I love the idea that anyone can publish their thoughts and get them out there and there’s a kind of a democracy to see which ideas rise to the top. If you have a niche, you can easily access that niche. Feeds help a lot because every publisher publishes at different intervals so, instead of checking the site a lot, readers can subscribe to the feed and get the content when it comes out.
Also, I’m internally looking at to how we can make the FeedBurner community stronger. Maybe we should set up FeedBurner meet-ups. I’d be interested to hear if that’s a good idea. If we have meetings in different cities, should we host meet-ups? Meeting our publishers is always lot of fun.
Are you part of a community?
Absolutely. That’s one of the reasons I got into the blogosphere in the first place and why I like FeedBurner so much. I realized it was where I wanted to go as soon as I stepped into the office. We work in an open offer where we all, and I mean all of us including the founders, have desks in one big room. Its great for communication and it’s fun!
Before FeedBurner entered the picture, I was looking at companies in Silicon Valley and Boston, but FeedBurner was just this great group of people. I knew right away that working there would be a lot of fun and very rewarding.
Funny thing, I was going to conferences already and talking to the blogging and podcasting communities, being that I’m a publisher myself. Now, I get paid for it. How great is that?!
Who’s contributing to FeedBurner’s future:
Our users contribute a lot to our success. They are a passionate group and aren’t afraid to let us know what we need to be doing, what they don’t like, and what they love. I watch Technorati on a daily basis and it’s amazing to see how many people will write about us on any given day. Some of this is praise, some of it is complaints so we try to respond quickly. It’s this constant feedback loop. We see a lot of posts that say “this is cool, and you should do it too!” The fact that they take a time to put a post out about how much they like FeedBurner is very rewarding.
Which RSS reader is on Eric Olson’s computer?
I use Newsgator Online and have used it ever since I have been reading feeds. I have been thinking about getting something more robust like FeedDemon but haven’t made the leap yet. With that said, I have accounts with most major readers for testing so I see a lot of the functionality out there.
Who are you reading?
Off the top, I’ll say Ventureblog.com from my own interest in startup capital. David Hornik is the one that inspired me to start blogging VC (and encouraged the idea of the VentureWeek Podcast too). He’s a great guy and a great VC.
Feld.com is another great one (disclosure: he’s one of our investors but I read him far before I started at FeedBurner). He talks about some great issues that entrepreneurs face and speaks to them from a VCs perspective. Plus, he posts pictures of his treadputer… long story, don’t ask.
TechCrunch. That’s an obvious one. Who doesn’t read that!
VC Confidential — (another one of our investors). Matt McCall is writing some cool stuff that entrepreneurs can benefit from: how to value companies, etc. It’s his outreach to help entrepreneurs to understand what’s going on in VCs heads.
Seeing Both Sides by Jeff Bussgang over at IDG ventures is another favorite. He’s a VC and a huge Sox fan. There’s a nice picture of him on the blog with all kinds of Red Sox stuff in the back. I did a podcast with him and Dave Balter, the CEO of BzzAgent, recently which was a blast!
Another good one on climate related stuff is TerraBlog by the TerraPass people. TerraPass is a neat thing I discovered. What they do is calculate the amount of CO2 your car produces in a given year and then figures out a dollar amount you can send them. They invest the money you send in enough clean technology to balance our your car use. Super cool social entrepreneurship stuff. I just love that.
On to more social entrepreneurship: I am a very big proponent of the use of microfinance to end world poverty. Unitus is a microfinance group that I love. They are, in a sense, VCs to microfinance organizations. They help them grow through capital, consulting and technology. Their blog is a great microfinance resource.
Let’s see, RedSox.com, of course. Hardball times is another great baseball pub especially if you love metrics and the analytics. I’m reading 70 something feeds right now so I’ll stop here but if anyone wants my OPML I am happy to share!
Which podcasts are you listening to or viewing?
Venturecast by David Hornik. It’s fairly infrequent, but he records random thoughts while in his car commuting, on various thoughts, models and companies.
I listen to Alex Reimer. He’s a Red Sox fan and he’s been on Leno. His show is called Without a Curse. It’s just great because he’s this kid (12 years old I think), but he has really insightful baseball analysis, and he gets big names from around Boston on the show.
I listen to C.C. Chapman’s podcast, Accident Hash for great new podsafe music. Sound Opinions is another good music show on Chicago Public Radio and via podcast.
I listen to some of the Podtech.net stuff, the VC ones, the tech ones. John’s stuff is great. He’s always getting top interviews. He’s breaking stories. He’s doing a lot with big tech. You’ve just gotta listen to Podtech.net.
I try to catch the IT Conversations ones that are of interest to me. They’re longer, but they’re always great. There’s a lot of content. It’s good because you can find what you like.
VentureVoice. I listen to him without fail. He just did one with the Brooklyn Breweries founder. It’s a cool interview based show focused on entrepreneurship.
Oh, and Dane Cook. He’s by far my favorite standup comic. I used to go see him all the time. I subscribe to his podcast, and I’m on his site pretty frequently to see where I can catch him. Unfortunately this time in Boston, he was sold out, but that’s awesome that he’s selling out arenas. It’s a more interesting story to me personally, because of his use of social media to develop his audience and personal brand. He was very smart about using MySpace, using feeds and using blogs, to connect to his fans in a more personal way. It is a brilliant story regarding how to use social media to get your stuff out there.
Funny thing, I emailed him because I’m still a regular subscriber to his podcast. I said I’ve been a fan of yours for years. You should swing by the FeedBurner office. We have to get your feeds on FeedBurner.
At FeedBurner we try to gather for lunch at the same table and we’ve got this flat screen monitor in the kitchen. A lot of times it’s The Daily Show, and lately we’re going through Aqua Teen Hunger Force, which is now a favorite of my CTO and has been a favorite of mine for years. But if I’m grabbing the content, I love to get Dane Cook’s clips from YouTube.
Are you watching any video podcasts?
There’s only a couple that I watch without fail as I don’t have a video iPod yet: Ask a Ninja, and the new Ricky Gervais videocast. Ask a Ninja is phenomenal and everyone should check it out.
Lots of people aren’t using RSS feeds. What’s the deal?
We compare our podcast numbers to what iTunes has, and we are pretty well matched up. Overall we manage about 275,000 feeds (both text and rich media) as of this past Monday, but we don’t know how many publishers aren’t using us. As there are so many publishers out there its hard to figure a percentage on how many use us of the total.
I think RSS use is picking up though as the value proposition is a clear one. For example, my Dad got an RSS reader a few weeks ago now. When her picked me up from the airport the other day he said, “Yeah I meant to tell you that this is saving me so much time. I used to go to lots of websites and there’s nothing new there. Now, in the reader, I am able to rifle through it. It takes me ten minutes instead of an hour.”
IE 7 should have a profound impact on the amount of RSS use out there as they have built it right into the browser. Firefox has had this capability for a while but the majority of people are still using IE so they haven’t been exposed to it.
What has to improve in getting blogs to talk better to feeds?
I think the hosted blog services will really need to allow users to redirect their feeds. This benefits the user. Let’s say I want to hop from typepad to WordPress but all my subscribers are on my typepad feed. Well, now they are stuck there and I will have to ask them to move. This problem is eliminated if you are using a FeedBurner feed but, even still, if you are an established blogger not using us and you now want to, you have a lot of subscribers on your original feed that we can’t count unless you can redirect to us. With the hosted services you can’t redirect so part of your subscriber base is always missing from your stats.
The fact is that we’ve got good relationships with all of the blogging services. It’s just a matter of getting the time to sit down and ask, “how do we integrate better?” I think it’ll be simple fix. It’s great that there’s a community. We’re all friendly with each other and we all want each other to succeed.
What’s your view on partnering?
We’re of the same mind on partnering as we are with newsreaders. Basically, everything we have is opt-in, every little option. You can choose. We think users should have a choice. I’ll use feed-to-e-mail to illustrate my point though. We originally offered only FeedBlitz. Squeet then emerged and people wanted to use that. We said, “okay, we’ll hook up with Squeet.” Then, we came out with our own feed-to-e-mail service and offered that along with Squeet and FeedBlitz. We really want our users to have a choice.
What’s next? What’s 2007 bringing for FeedBurner?
Right now, we’ve been working hard on shorter term things, three, six months out. We’re working on the engineering schedule: what’s got to be built. A lot happens where we want to adapt to what users want. We want to be nimble enough to innovate quickly. We want to remain useful for people.
Specific to being here at Podcast Academy, we’re looking at ways to help monetize podcasts, which should come out somewhere around the end of the year. We’re taking the approach of building good tools first, as we did with text feeds, in order to provide podcasters with tools to grow the medium. This will set them up to be very successful with the advertising piece when it arrives.
We definitely take a measured approach to doing things. The service may roll out a little slower than other programs, but we think this is best for long-term success.
From the academy, I’m picking up some great ideas. Have we thought about this? Why can’t we do this metric? What’s the limitation? We’re working hard on that now. That’s something specific we’re doing in relation to podcasting.
Long term, we’re trying to keep refining the service, looking to remain relevant. Any kinds of improvements to RSS or stats we can add we will. The more features publishers want the more we’ll add.
At the end of the day, we’re successful when our publishers our successful. To that end, we will continue to make feeds easier to use for all involved through the various tools and metrics we create and provide.
Eric Olson is available at [email protected] .
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