A thread on Web4Lib about measuring RSS usage through web logs made me realize how tricky this is. Aggregators (and browsers, such as Firefox, Safari, and IE 7) all request RSS feeds from your server, often several times a day. It is hard to tell how much your feed is being used -- the RSS feed for this blog, http://www.rss4lib.com/index.xml, was accessed 19,455 times in October. Which sounds impressive, right?

However, that means that a constellation of individual web browsers, news aggregators, and search engines was checking the feed once a day, once an hour, once a week... Or at some frequency.

I know how many Bloglines subscribers there are (334 as of right now). But I can't keep track of how many are reading this through Yahoo!, Google, NewsGator online, or this, that or the other aggregator.

Looking at the detailed web server log report (which is generated by my host using Analog), I see that some aggregators add the number of users they are collecting data for -- basically, a subscription report. So I can see, in a recent month, the following details:

Bloglines/3.1 (http://www.bloglines.com; 320 subscribers)
NewsGatorOnline/2.0 (http://www.newsgator.com; 7 subscribers)
AttensaOnline/1.0 (http://www.attensa.com; 1 subscribers)
Feedshow/1.0 (http://www.feedshow.com; 1 subscriber)

(This is for several different feeds for several different RSS services -- taken from my entire server report, not just for the main feed for RSS4Lib.)

I also see the hits for all of one kind of web browser -- in this example, Safari, get lumped together as one browser type, "AppleSyndication/54". Different versions of Safari have different browser types, so I also see "AppleSyndication/53", for example.

In short, it's very hard to gauge readership -- to separate reads from aggregator or browser "are you updated" hits. This is doubly true since so many people, myself included, read the full text of a post within the aggregator and rarely click through to the site where "spider" hits and "user" hits can be separated, mostly, by a good web log analyzer application.

P.S. I find this amazing, but this is the 100th post on my blog.... Happy "centennial" to me!

Update -- 21 Feb 2007 Google Reader's crawler, Feedfetcher-Google, now includes a subscriber count when it grabs your RSS feed. In my log file, a sample line looks like Feedfetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html; 133 subscribers; feed-id=1495776793707971617). Thanks to Taming the Beast for this tip.

An article in today's New York Times, "Pictures, With Map and Pushpin Included," (registration required), talks about the increasing use of "geotagging" (see my June 17, 2005, post, "Geotagging") in home photography. What is interesting is that Sony now has a small GPS unit designed to integrate with your camera's EXIF data -- so once you've taken your pictures and gone home, you can download both the pictures and your GPS data into your computer and merge them.

Flickr, of course, lets you manually add GPS data, and there are rumors -- with some evidence to back them up -- that Apple's iPhoto has some currently-inactive code to integrate GPS data in iPhoto with Google Maps.

So what I'd like someone to do is this. Build a search tool that lets you look for pictures of the same place you took a memorable or significant picture. Then, sign up for an RSS feed for that location -- that will deliver other people's photos to you as they are taken. Curious to see a particular park where you used to play? Want to see the view inside a ballpark on different days? In a sense, this would be a webcam with highly irregular postings. This would also a way to link you -- to build a community of a different kind -- to other people who just might have more in common than having been in the same place at a different time.

I received a press release from the folks at ScienceDirect announcing their "TOP25" service:

I have two complaints, one minor, one major. The minor one first -- a quarterly updating to the alert may make sense, but more frequent updates would be better. Particularly in regard to my major complaint.

My major complaint is that receiving these alerts by email is all well and good -- but where's the RSS? If done properly, a library could get RSS feeds for use on a subject guide, for example, that include OpenURL links links, pre-formatted for the library's link resolver. That would drive visitors to the ScienceDirect site and make my life easier.

UPDATE 13 November 2006 10:00 AM: In response to my email (with similar suggestions oulined above) to ScienceDirect, I received a reply from Brant Emery, the TOP25 Project Manager at ScienceDirect. He wrote (quoted with his permission):

So stay tuned...

Jill Stover of Library Marketing - Thinking Outside the Book (a great source of library marketing ideas, by the way), wrote about a handy feature added to the Engineering Village 2 database. Once you're in the database and viewing the abstract of an article, there's a link to "blog this". That link, when clicked, gives you a snippet of code to put into your weblog.

The code EV2 provides gives the title of the article and a graphic for EV2. Clicking on either will bring you through your library's proxy server to the full text. (This example will work if you have access to Tufts University's proxy server, but not for anyone else...):

Corrosion and fatigue characteristics of positively polarised Zeron 100 base and weld metal in synthetic seawater

Jill notes how useful this functionality is for librarians who want to highlight tools available to their patrons. I take this one step further: why not have a link to "blog this" appear on any relevant portion of the library site? From a change in hours to a new exhibit in the library lobby to other news, events, or information of note -- make it easy for your patrons to link to the source of the information when they are blogging.