--- title: "Feedburner and Blog-Centered Stats" date: 2004-10-19 author: "Richard MacManus" categories: - name: "ReadWriteWeb" url: "/category/readwriteweb.md" tags: - name: "2004" url: "/tag/2004.md" --- # Feedburner and Blog-Centered Stats As a follow-up to [my previous post](https://web.archive.org/web/20050213045154/http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/002343.php), I decided to take the plunge and sign up with [Feedburner](https://web.archive.org/web/20050213045154/http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/home) (hat tip to [Cristian](https://web.archive.org/web/20050213045154/http://www.cristianvidmar.com/2004/10/14.html#a293)!). Feedburner is a third-party service that generates an enhanced RSS feed for you. What’s enhanced about it? For starters it enables you to track RSS statistics for *all* RSS Aggregators (not just Bloglines). Feedburner does much more too – e.g. it has a “browser-friendly” option that hides the XML code from users and it lets you splice in Flickr photos or del.icio.us links to your RSS feed. Feedburner is a great service, packed with features, but there is a trade-off… Basically I’ve handed over control of my RSS feed to a third party, mainly so I can get some decent stats. I’m not overly comfortable with a third-party hosting my RSS feed, but then the decentralized content model is getting more and more acceptable on the Web (I use [Flickr](https://web.archive.org/web/20050213045154/http://www.flickr.com/photos/ricmac/) and [del.icio.us](https://web.archive.org/web/20050213045154/http://del.icio.us/readwriteweb) now too). I want to reiterate that Bloglines subscriber stats has a pretty large margin of error. As I said in my previous post, some people have a variety of RSS/Atom feeds associated with 1 blog. Bloglines only tracks each feed individually. In fact I myself have some subscribers on a little-known RSS 1.0 feed I have – and those subscribers don’t show up in the Subscriber stats for my main RSS 2.0 feed. Now that I have a Feedburner RSS feed, that situation will get worse because now I have a *third* RSS feed associated with this blog. I configured it so that Feedburner tracks them all as 1, which is the correct way to do it. Bloglines, by tracking each of my 3 feeds separately, is fragmenting my reader statistics. Put another way – Feedburner takes a **blog-centered** approach to stats-tracking, while Bloglines takes a **feed-centered** approach. I much prefer blog-centered, as it’s a fairer reflection of how many people subscribe to your content. I’ve emailed [Bloglines Support](https://web.archive.org/web/20050213045154/http://www.bloglines.com/) to ask if they can fix this situation and provide an aggregate count of subscribers for any one blog – no matter how many different feeds it has. It’s too early to discuss what my trends are in [Feedburner](https://web.archive.org/web/20050213045154/http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/home), but I will write about it later. If you want to try Feedburner out, MT users can follow the instructions [here](https://web.archive.org/web/20050213045154/http://www.burningdoor.com/feedburner/archives/000425.html) and [here](https://web.archive.org/web/20050213045154/http://www.burningdoor.com/feedburner/archives/000478.html). For Radio users, [Cristian](https://web.archive.org/web/20050213045154/http://www.cristianvidmar.com/) sent me a couple of very informative emails that hopefully he’ll post on his weblog. **Update:** Great minds think alike. [Jason Fried also](https://web.archive.org/web/20050213045154/http://www.37signals.com/svn/archives/000896.php) has a post about Feedburner today and he lists some other benefits – including that it requires no change on the reader side and it takes the RSS load off your web server. Plus Dick Costolo from Feedburner points in the comments to [a handy FAQ](https://web.archive.org/web/20050213045154/http://www.burningdoor.com/feedburner/archives/000688.html). 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