It's just like Pinnochio's nose

At the end of January, I reported that Feedburner's stats showed that over time 51 different types of feed readers, aggregators and bots had accessed the blog.

Today that figure is 61, including three cutely named and highly memorable visitors: ocgnpaCs4eCrcdamsfuu4c4n ggp, tctnbtkw9yoj9 x ps oxcpvajmNrtx and eapjsi dm f vtv ei0x all of which appear in the feed reader and aggregator area.

More Feedburner stats

Taking a quick look at my FeedBurner stats for the week-end I noticed that Sunday's figures for subscribers seemed to have taken a sharp dip. Feedburner expects subscriber numbers to reduce at the week-end and has several reminders dotted around its site so that neophyte bloggers aren't shocked when they see their numbers coasting south.

This was a little different though since on looking a bit further, the email subscriber category was missing and since emails work on a push basis, they tend to be much more static than the figures for other types of subscribers. Adding those subscribers back in, the week-end total was actually pretty flat.

Now that I have satisfied myself why the total dipped so sharply, I can stop worrying about it and do something more important.

FeedBurner stats

At the end of January I made a post about FeedBurner's stats for this blog. At that time, the all time stats showed visits by 51 different types of browsers, bots, readers and aggregators and that was an increase of 10 in the previous 6 weeks.

Today, the same report has 61 lines excluding category headings so there are plenty of new programs out there sampling the blog universe.

How long is your tail? (FeedBurner stats)

It's about six weeks since I last took a look at FeedBurner's stats to see how many Feed Readers and Aggregators have accessed the blog over time. The current figure is 51 different types of browsers, bots, readers and aggregators. That's an increase of 10 new lines in the report in the intervening period.

We talk about the long tail in relation to keyword searches, but there is a different kind of long tail developing in RSS feeds.

A question from a subscriber

Someone using Yahoo! to look access my RSS feed sent me an email to ask what had happened to me over the holiday - had I stopped posting permanently? No actually, I haven't stopped posting at all. I have posted every day of the holiday, and on average nearly two posts per day.

It seems that Yahoo!, despite sending a bot to run over the feed several times a day (four times in the last hour) hasn't been reporting the updates to my subscriber. Maybe this is the real reason that people move around from feed reader to feed reader. People use one for a while and then find that it isn't working perfectly so they move somewhere else in the hope that the new one will work better.

It's the season

FeedBurner cautions, quite rightly, not to get excited if subscriber numbers fall off at week-ends. They should include major holidays as well. It isn't just subscribers, it's visitor counts as well.

Just for fun I took a quick look at the visitor stats for an A list blogger and was pleased to see that I'm not the only person who has had volatile stats during December. I'm not trying to suggest that the two sets of data are comparable - the A list blog is enormously popular and it regularly has 90,000 visitors a month. Within the totals though, there is enormous daily movement and that's true for my counts, too. Whisper it quietly, but my daily figures show lower volatility!

FeedBurner stats

I periodically look at FeedBurner's stats to see how many Feed Readers and Aggregators have accessed the blog over time. The current figure is 41 different types of browsers, bots, readers and aggregators.

That's a lot of variety. I'm sure that this experimentation comes about because people aren't sure how they want to access RSS and they are continuing to try a range of different tools to see if their customer experience changes substantially. None of their friends are telling them that THIS is the product to use.

Feed Readers and User Agents

The list just keeps growing. Now it is up to 40 lines excluding category headers. Not just programs I haven't heard of, but a reader that Feedburner hasn't heard of either since there is a 'not identified' in the list.

What I don't know is whether all this variety is driven by new people coming in as subscribers with different readers or whether my existing subscribers have become disenchanted with what they were already using and have decided to experiment with another program. Based on the stats that I'm able to drive out of the site stats package I'll never know.

What drives this variety? In so many other areas of computing life, there are a few stand-out programs that people use all over the world. Sometimes, particular communities exhibit preferences which are slightly different from the norm (38% of the visitors to this blog use Firefox which is well above what you might expect). In readers though, there doesn't seem to be a predictable pattern. Perhaps it's because we haven't really worked out how we want to make best use of RSS and the experimentation with different readers reflects that.

Tags:

• Blogging

Blogger has a fit of picque

I posted a couple of things the other day and when I looked for them today, they had disappeared. I know that I wrote them and they were in the RSS feed so I simply reposted them by cutting and pasting.

Bizarre. Let's hope that this isn't going to be a regular occurence in the future.

Tags:

• Blogging

Where do the subscribers come from?

Someone asked me where my subscribers are based and I don't have a good answer. I have subscribers from Europe, Scandinavia and the USA but I'm not sure how many sit in any particular country although I do get a report about subscriber totals which shows how the numbers vary from day to day and which mechanism they have used to access the feed. I know where some of them are of course, I have a Vienna user based in Spain, but that's the extent of my knowledge - I may well have Firefox live bookmarks readers based there but I don't know.

This looks like a non-trivial exercise best left for someone with much more time on their hands than me.

Tags

• Blogging

Feed readers and User Agents

In early August I reported that the Feedburner report was 31 lines long excluding category headings. Today it has 34.

Feed readers and aggregators:

• NewsGator Online
  
• Thunderbird
• A Java-based feed reader
• Biz 360 spider
• Blogwise-CacheBuilder/0.3
• Firefox Live Bookmarks
• Google Feedfetcher
• Jakarta Commons Generic Client
• Linkie Winkie Crawler
• MJ12bot/v1.08
• My Yahoo
• NetNewsWire
• Snapbot/1.0
• URI::Fetch/0.05
• Vienna
• msnbot-Newsblogs/1.0
• wwwster/1.4

not forgetting the email subscription service (1), web browsers (4) and assorted bots (12). Quite a collection, I'll be interested to see how it progresses.

Tags

• Blogging

Feed readers and User agents

At the beginning of July I made a post about my Feedburner stats for the previous month - I think that there were 13 feed readers and user agents during that period and I made the comment that I was surprised by how rich the list was, unlike browsers and operating systems which look almost monocultural by comparison.

Here is the total list of agents that have visited the blog:

• a Java-based feed reader
• NewsGator Online
  
• Thunderbird
• Biz360 spider
• Blogwise-Cache Builder
• Firefox Live Bookmarks
• Google Feedfetcher
• Jakarta Commons Generic Client
  
• Linkie Winkie Crawler
• MJ12bot
• NetNewsWire
• SnapBot
• URI::Fetch
• msnbot-NewsBlogs
• wwwster

that's without adding in the subscription feed, 4 kinds of browsers and 11 assorted bots. The Feedburner report is now 31 lines long excluding category headings. This looks like a great opportunity for consolidation.

Tags

• Blogging

Linkie Winkie returns

Golly, it's back. After over 3 weeks without any sighting, the crawler has been in my feed again. It's nice to see it back again. I also saw an interview by Gurtie which said that the experiment was developing in unexpected ways so perhaps they will be inclined to give us more detail when they eventually decide to bring it to a close.

Other crawlers that have followed a me-too strategy of mystery like Miffo don't seem to have generated the coverage and excitement of Linkie Winkie. Looking at the Alexa traffic graph though, it seems that the traffic is still running at lower levels than it achieved at the beginning of July.

I did take a quick look at the inbound links and it is genuinely impressive - remember that this is a site which was put together in the last week of June. Yahoo! shows 737 links, down from its peak towards the end of July but MSN shows 3455 links, pretty well double the level since I started tracking on 13 July.

Tags

• LinkieWinkie
• Blogging

Blogging and RSS - how much time to invest?

I don't have an answer - people seem to think that I spend a lot of time developing content for this, but it's not the case. Dumping a few thoughts onto a screen and then sub-editing it to make sure that the language is relatively glitch-free doesn't take that long. Some of the material is content which has already been developed in other contexts, I simply drop it into a blog format. It doesn't seem like an onerous task to keep it live, and the number of subscribers continues to increase steadily. I seem to spend more time looking at the stats than I do on creating content which probably says quite a lot about me.

Interestingly, some people are starting to see blogging as a serious marketing channel for people businesses. Steve Rubel's post describes a couple of businesses that are dropping their websites in favour of blogs. That's brave, because people aren't sufficiently familiar with feeds to stay in touch with the content. I can understand why a blog helps to develop a dialogue with the world outside, but I'm not convinced that the time is right to use it as the only channel. So, back to the question - how much time to invest? The answer has to be, not too much. Blogging has yet to prove itself as a serious contender for staying in touch with a target community, and the techno-savvy teens seem even less aware of RSS than their seniors. RSS probably needs a severe make-over. Asa Dotzler's post on the Microsoft announcement about RSS is worth a quick look:

"Something as small as a name or icon choice can make a big difference in how approachable a new feature is. I'm encouraged that we're further distancing browsers from the awful "RSS" as a feature name and icon identifier. We don't call web pages "HTML + CSS + JavaScript Pages" and we don't identify them in the browser using little icons containing "HTML" and "CSS" acronyms; We shouldn't do it for feeds either."

Tags

• Blogging

Chicklets for RSS

It's interesting that the small icons for RSS feeds are called chicklets - it sounds as if we are talking about small chickens. I thought that they were named after the US sweet which is small and rectangular which would make the spelling chiclets.

On checking, I find that bubblegum comes in both spellings, so I was both right and wrong.

The reason for the post is that some blogs have an array of chicklets which allow you to subscribe to the content using your favourite reader. That can be confusing, particularly if your favourite reader isn't included in the list. Here's a site which says why standardisation would be helpful.

By the way, although I give 2 links to a feed for this site, they are both XML/RSS feeds through Feedburner. If you have any difficulty in using the feed then please let me know. The icon used is the recommended international standard for feeds.

Tags

• Blogging