Another great reason to flip your default atom feed over to Feedburner, gang!! TechCrunch reports a suite of new Feedburner services, called Feedflare, that enable the integration of web-based blog features into your feed, breaking down some of the barriers between subscribers and readers, and offering blog-style information in the reader:

If a publisher chooses to include one or more services, they appear at the bottom of the feed. Currently offered services include:

* Email this - Send a link to your item to someone via email.
* Email author - Allow subscribers to email you directly.
* Technorati Cosmos - Display the number of links to your item from blogs, as measured by Technorati.
* Del.icio.us tags - Lists del.icio.us tags for an item.
* Save to del.icio.us - Allows subscribers to bookmark the item with del.icio.us.
* Count comments - Lists the number of comments posted to an item (for WordPress blogs only).
* Creative Commons - Displays the Creative Commons license that you may have applied to your feed or post.

I have enabled a number of these features on the Freshblog feed, and look forward to seeing what the open API throws up. If you're a subscriber, let me know whether these features are useful to you, and how they look in your reader.

Filed in: feedburner, feeds, rss, webtech, blogtech