FW: [Web4lib] RSS Subscription Stats?

[Gimon, Charles A]

Couple of issues:

--One person using a standalone product like FeedReader may be
requesting your feed many times a day.

--Many people may be accessing your feed through a web-based aggregator
like 2rss.com. 

Sometimes one person will appear to be many, other times many people
will appear to be one. I guess it depends on how particlar your
end-users are about stat details. Counting "people" is, if anything,
even more problematic than it is with regular web pages.

Comparing one month of activity to another, or one feed to another, is
no problem, of course. You can probably adapt whatever web server log
analysis software you have to get raw numbers of hits.

If it's actually a "subscription", you could make people fill out a form
first to create an account, then make them use their account ID to
access the feed--but then you're making people jump through a hoop to
get to your content, which can be unpopular and counterproductive. Also
could make your feed look unlovely in an aggregator or search engine
listing. And also could lead to privacy concerns (how closely are you
tracking usage for each user?).

--Charles Gimon
  Web Coordinator
  Minneapolis Public Library


-----Original Message-----
From: web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org
[mailto:web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org] On Behalf Of Smith, Sarah
Sent: Thursday, December 01, 2005 3:59 PM
To: web4lib at webjunction.org
Subject: [Web4lib] RSS Subscription Stats?


If I make an XML feed on a library website, is there any way to tell how
many people subscribe to it? I did do a few Internet searches and found
services that would do stats for one if their feed were through the
service, but I'd like to keep everything in house. TIA!

Sarah A Smith
Web Development Librarian
San Joaquin Valley Library System
2420 Mariposa Street, Fresno, CA 93721
559.488.3260      sarah.smith at sjvls.org


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