[consulting] Tracking readership via RSS

[George]

not been reading all of thread, but:

yahoo pipes - pipes.yahoo.com powerful and beautiful ui. would allow you 
to combine lots of things together!

also, transp. gif is the only way to track readership.

however, google webmaster tools allows you to track those who have 
subscribed with google, but of course, you need to assertain what % of 
the total readership that is. ie. a rough guide, but useless i guess for 
real stats.

Bill Fitzgerald wrote:
> 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
>