Subscription Knowledge
One of the biggest drawbacks of RSS (or, as Greg has just been saying, "Syndication") is the difficulty in knowing who is actually using your feed. While it is easy enough to find out who is looking at your main page, those who subscribe to a blog's RSS feed will most likely not show up in the site statistics. And, at least to my knowledge, there are no easy tools to help with that.
Dave Winer at Scripting News has a partial solution using shared OPML files (an OPML file is a listing of all the RSS feeds you are using). Sign up at his site, upload your OPML file, and then everyone can see who you're subscribing to.
There's some problems, though. First, you have to know what the heck an OPML file is. Second, it's opt-in, so you still don't have an accurate count (nor will you ever). Third, this is tricky because there are some subscriptions that I use that are just for my work and I don't want those public.
Nevertheless, this is a good start in the right direction. Perhaps we could implement something like that for Terrablogs, if there is both the demand for it and time to develop.
What I would really like, though, is a simple tool to comb through the server log and give me a report of all the IP addresses that are accessing the xml file. This report would quickly tell me the frequency with which that IP address downloads the feed, average time between updates, and so on. If anyone knows of such a tool that we could install on terrablogs, please let me know.
January 6, 2004 11:42 AM