FeedBurner have today announced that two of their PRO features are now free and are available to all FeedBurner Publishers. This is their first major change after their recent acquisition by Google. Thats one thing that i like about google a lot. Two of Feedburner’s services viz. TotalStats and MyBrand will be free for everyone.

FeedBurner Stats PRO

PRO is feed analytics taken to the next level. You will now have access to the number of people who have viewed or clicked individual content items in your feed and “Reach,” which estimates the daily number of subscribers who interacted with your feed content. You can turn this on by signing in to your account, navigating to the Analyze tab and heading to the FeedBurner Stats PRO section. Click the “Item Views” checkbox to activate these PRO features.

MyBrand

The MyBrand service (also PRO-level) is located under the “My Account” tab after you’ve signed in. MyBrand lets you maintain consistency between your feed address and your hosted website’s domain, if matchy-matchy is your thing. For example, rather than using feeds.feedburner.com/MyFeedName, your MyBrand-ed feed address can be feeds.myexcellentdomain.net/MyFeedName. To get started with MyBrand, sign into FeedBurner, click the “My Account” link in the upper left-hand corner, and then click “MyBrand”. Nota Bene: You must be comfortable playing around with DNS entries and own the rights to the domain whose DNS entries you’ll be playing around with in order to successfully activate MyBrand.

Something inside my mind told me today to use some Blog Post to Speech application and publish a podcast. I didn’t know what to do. I did a google search and found out Odiogo. I signed-up for their service, but they had to approve me before i can use their site. I left them and found Talkr. That was somewhat better than Odiogo. My account was instantly activated and i added my blog. Their wordpress plugin led me to a 404 Not Found page. Then i managed to find the links to the .MP3 files. I had to download them. But they worked pretty nice, but with some flaws.

After these, i discovered this extremely simple website. Feed2Podcast. I was really amazed at their simplicity. I entered my feed address in their text box and hit “Go”. My Podcast widget was created immediately. I have it now on this site, here. Also they provided me an online link, where people can hear to the podcasts. Podcasts are pretty new to me. But these look good. Hmm..