[consulting] Tracking readership via RSS

[Bill Fitzgerald]

Hello, Ryan,

Ryan Cross wrote:
>
>
> Also - can I ask specifically what types of problems people are 
> experiencing with feedburner? I haven't used it enough to notice any 
> issues and its odd that there doesn't seem to be any strong 
> alternatives in the market.

On a few different occasions, Feedburner would randomly munge feeds -- 
everything from feeds not being accessible, to older posts getting mixed 
into new posts, to updates not showing up for days. Also, feed counts 
would fluctuate wildly, varying by several hundred "subscribers" in 
either direction over short (6-12 hours) periods of time.

The main reason to use feedburner was something I heard back in the day, 
when non-technical people still had difficulty generating standard xml 
for podcasts: feedburner did this automatically, and got you decent 
stats on your audience. But this was back in 2004-2005.

I think the reason that there isn't a real competitor in the market is 
that there really isn't much of a market there. There are so  many other 
ways to do what feedburner is attempting to do -- part of why I wanted 
feedback from the list is to be disabused of that notion :) If there is 
a tool that provides more useful numbers, I'd love to see it -- but, it 
seems that for now, using 1-2 different tracking tools, and using them 
in reference to one another to spot trends (aka, what we've been doing) 
is probably the way to go.

Anyone have other suggestions/insights?

Cheers,

Bill

-- 

Bill Fitzgerald
http://funnymonkey.com
FunnyMonkey -- Click. Connect. Learn.
ph. 503 897 7160