# Feeds: Managed or Not?

[Tony Gentile](http://www.buzzhit.com/about.html) over at buzzhit asked a few questions re [Do you read or run a managed feed?](http://www.buzzhit.com/2005/03/do-you-read-or-run-managed-feed.html). I thought I might as well share these answers through a post. Here we go:

_My questions to **readers** of managed Feeds are:_

_A) Does the fact that a Feed is being managed affect your willingness to subscribe to it?_

Not really, except if being managed leads to the feed to be easy to subscribe to. If I am interested in a blog, I will try to find a way to add it to my rssreader (NewsGator). My OPML file will then make its way into Bloglines so that I can read my feeds on the road, or on my phone.

_B) Does the fact that a Feed is managed impact your reading experience? If so, how?_

Splicing of del.icio.us or flickr pictures in a blog feed can be annoying, depending on the relative number of posts. I would always suggest to offer a main feed and a spliced feed to provide readers with the choice of which to subscribe to.

_C) If the Feed Management Service were to go out of business, or if the Feed Owner decided to abandon the service, would you update your aggregator to reflect the new URL?_

Provided that the blog author has a means to let me/us know, and provided that I am still committed to that blog, absolutely.

_And, for **Feed Owners**:_

_1) Which FMS service(s) (e.g., measurement, free bandwidth, advertising, etc) motivated you to sign-up?_

Essentially audience measurement, and which posts are more interesting than others (since I publish full posts through RSS, interest is measured by click-throughs on an article to check/leave comments).

_2) What FMS services have you added on over time?_

I started with [sitemeter](http://www.sitemeter.com/) a while back, because of the limitations of TypePad’s statistics. Then added to [StatCounter](http://www.statcounter.com/), because of its better granularity.

_3) How long has your Feed been managed?_

I started using FeedBurner about a month ago, but I have just added it as the main feed — leaving the default RSS and Atom feeds managed by TypePad. I just have not yet come around to risking losing some readers by turning these feeds off.

_4&5) What would cause you to abandon the managed Feed approach? What would cause you to switch to a different FMS provider?_

I don’t think I would stop using a managed feed, I might decide to move to another manager if that made sense feature-wise.

_6) What services do you wish your FMS offered?_

FeedBurner is satisfactory for now, but I would bundle functionality of a StatCounter and a MyBlogLog to have a complete offering regarding traffic measurement, keywords searched, outlinks, etc.

_7) What difference has having your Feed managed made to you, from either (or both) an authoring or monetizing perspective?_

Not much, besides giving me a better sense of the size of my feed readership, and which posts seem to be of interest. I used to use BlogLines subscription as a proxy, but it is only a proxy.

_8) Anything else you’d care to share!_

SixApart should offer all these features in the standard platform. As I was discussing with [Bill Burnham](http://billburnham.blogs.com/burnhamsbeat/) this afternoon when we met to catch up, FeedBurner is in a great position to greatly leverage this distribution of feeds on the basis of a limited infrastructure.

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