What I don't like about feedburner

Posted by Ian Holsman Sat, 22 Jul 2006 07:51:05 GMT

First let me say I love FeedBurner and use it on most of my sites. It provides a simple way of collecting stats on who how populars your feeds are. (I’m happy to say I have over 100 people subscribed to this blog).

and If I cared enough i would get some great stats on who you guys are, and what your reading.

but there is the problem.

feedburner locks me in and hides this from my application.

when implementing Economy Chat I chose to implement a simple wisdom of the crowds feature which showed which posts were popular . Part of this feature was trying to implement 1 user 1 vote so that people coming back to the same page wouldn’t obscure the stats.

This worked fine for general web viewers, but failed miserably when it came to people who viewed it via RSS. (which make up a sizeable portion of readers). as feedburner can’t personalize the URLs being passed to the RSS reader and associate them with my a specific individual when they click through.

of course other web-based viewers like blog lines do similar things as well, which makes it very hard to get usage data. (that and some RSS viewers are very privacy protective and don’t pass cookies through, which isn’t a bad thing from the consumers point of view).

what would be REALLY REALLY great is if services like bloglines and feedburner could pass some kind of unique id in the post link they generate to allow RSS provides to get access to these stats.

but they don’t.

so I’m stuck generating unique URLs for each visitor and forcing bloglines to read my news one per subscriber and not being able to use feedburner’s great stats either :-(

Posted in  | Tags , , ,  | no comments | no trackbacks

Interested in what I read?

Posted by Ian Holsman Wed, 15 Mar 2006 15:32:00 GMT

you can now look at megite to find out… Thanks Matthew!

Cool. now .. what they really need to do is add a network effect here.

If other people are also viewing the same blog post and rate it ‘cool’ then it should highlight that on megite so I can filter the ~2000 unread blog posts by the crowd’s value system. ie.. this blog post had a 50% approval rating.. so it shows up at the top.

Thanks once again Matthew.

Posted in  | Tags ,  | no comments | no trackbacks

Are you surfing more?

Posted by Ian Holsman Thu, 29 Sep 2005 00:14:00 GMT

so I was reading Matt’s entry about how about how the supply and demand of information has changed from ‘surfing’ the web finding useful information, to 2000-2002 of going to a portal and getting your info that way, to about a year ago where you would rely on search or 3-4 ‘memorized’ sites… (but he says it in a better way).

well I’ve come to thinking.. now I have a RSS reader my ‘memorized’ sites have gone to about 200. and I regularly ‘surf’ through the links that fellow bloggers put on their sites. (and then subscribe to them, and then surf through their links).

So I am using the blogosphere as a ‘filter’, and trusting them much more than a regular portal/information site’s links out, I still hardly click on a link ‘outside’ of a news portal, and my level of searching is going down as well.

strange eh?

Posted in  | Tags ,  | no comments | no trackbacks

I got a golden ticket

Posted by Ian Holsman Tue, 27 Sep 2005 03:46:00 GMT

No.. not charlie in the chocolate factory, I got a invite to open a blog on wordpress.com.

Will I switch.. probably not, I use tinkering on this box to procrastinate.. and wordpress.com doesn’t have as many knobs, so my main aim isnt fulfilled. BUT I am not the target market for it.

Read more...

Posted in  | Tags ,  | no comments | no trackbacks

Firefox Blog Search plugin

Posted by Ian Holsman Sat, 17 Sep 2005 15:30:00 GMT

I created this mainly for myself, but thought the whole world might like it.

A plugin in to all allow you to search googles new blog search in your firefox toolbar.

right now it still uses the default google image.. I’ll try my artistic hand soon and make it into a ‘B’.

once again comments/flames are welcome.

Update: The ‘B’ is there.

Posted in  | Tags , ,  | no comments | no trackbacks

Did Google just kill an emerging industry?

Posted by Ian Holsman Wed, 14 Sep 2005 23:52:00 GMT

with googles blog search being unwraped (thanks Ugo ) I think the valuation of the RSS search companies has been reduced to about zero.

you can do nifty things like link searches which is what icerocket is good at.. and you can naturally do searches much faster than technorati.

oh.. things like trackbacks, or pings aren’t required either anymore either.. but of course you’ll still get lots of comment spam as people try to link their page rank.

Hey Google.. if your listening.. Does api.google.com have access to this search?

pretty please!

Tags ,  | no comments | no trackbacks

Blogging Ping Stats

Posted by Ian Holsman Mon, 22 Aug 2005 01:09:00 GMT

I hooked up a simple listener to the Blo.gs cloud and recorded how often pings were received, and who sent them for 1 Day.


as you can see there are some people abusing the system, sending hundreds of pings a day, but they shouldn’t be causing too much trouble for the ping servers. I’m guessing someone’s RSS creation library pings automatically, and people are just blindly using the library in their code or something..

Another way to look at the same data:

Of all the pings sent 67% ofthem are from individual sources, with it reaching 90% at 7 pings from a single source. (95% is at 31 pings)

FYI Robert Scoble sent 8 pings that day, so he needs to work a bit harder to get himself out of the curve ;-)

Posted in  | Tags ,  | no comments | no trackbacks