PodLeaders - Thought Leaders podcast

Episode 30 of the PodLeaders show

My guest on the show today is Steve Olechowski - Steve is the COO and one of the co-founder’s of FeedBurner. FeedBurner is a company which helps you better manage your (RSS) feed - if you are publishing a podcast, FeedBurner helps you with the RSS so it gets properly parsed by iTunes. It also gives you stats on your feed such as how many people clicked on your links etc. and can even help you monetise your feed.

The Skype call broke down a couple of times during the interview so apologies if it sounds a little choppy.

Here are all the questions I asked Steve and the times in the interview I asked them:

Steve, can you start off with a little bit about yourself. What is your background? - 0:47

So the three of you guys have been working together on different startups for the last four years? - 3:36

What does FeedBurner do? - 4:22

Do you advise full or partial feeds for your publishers? - 9:46

Going back to monetisation - how do I go about setting that up on my feed? - 11:58

I listen to Todd Cochrane over at GeekNewsCentral quite a lot and one mantra he repeats is that you need to stay in control of your feed - why should I give control of my feed to FeedBurner - 13:16

On the stats front, which are the most popular desktop or online feed readers? 14:40

If the Mac has only four to five percent of the desktop market how do you account for the popularity of NetNewsWire as a reader? - 16:36

At the moment, how many feeds are you publishing? - 17:58

And what kind of growth rate are you seeing? - 18:22

I read Dave Sifry’s alerts and he maintains that the blogosphere is doubling in size every five and a half months. Are you seeing a similar rate of growth? - 18:56

How does that breakdown between blogs and podcasts? - 19:45

You also have paid services. What would I get from the paid services that I wouldn’t get from the free services? - 21:05

How do you think Microsoft’s announcements of support of RSS in IE7, Vista, and Office 12 will affect FeedBurner? - 22:18

I don’t know if you saw Steve Rubel’s idea to make Monday, May 1 RSS Appreciation Day? What do you make of that idea? - 24:00

What is FeedBurner’s business model? Is it just the paid services? - 25:56

Do you guys have an exit strategy? Are you hoping to be bought out by Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft or someone? - 27:38

And finally, what’s next for Feedburner? - 28:55

Download the entire interview here (14.3mb mp3)