Questions to readers: 1) Feedster aggregator users 2) Google audience
Two "reader poll" questions:
1) Are there really 84 subscribers using "Feedster" as an aggregator?
2) Is there anyone out there still hanging around just for the Google posts?
The current readership statistics for Infothought are roughly:
Bloglines (.RDF feed): 189
Bloglines (.XML feed): 39
Rojo: 27
Newsgator: 13
Livejournal: 11
Direct daily page views: ~100
website RSS Feed: ~175
Total: ~ 554
This is of necessity somewhat imprecise, but there aren't a thousand readers under a rock somewhere. Better than the average diary-writer, but basically unimproved, and still miserable in terms of changing the world. So:
1) There's a "feedster" entry in the logs which reads "Feedster Crawler/1.0; Feedster, Inc. (84 subscribers)". But that doesn't seem right. All the other aggregator numbers change slowly (-1, +1, -1, +1, -1, +1, +1, etc.). However, the Feedster entry ramped up fast and then doesn't move at all. Something's wrong with it. Did I get put on a default list, then taken off? I'm curious, if anyone knows how the Feedster stats work.
2) I had some intention of doing a no-"personal", more Google-focused, site, and trying to make sure I didn't lose the "search" audience until I got it set up. But my current PAID programming consulting is happily rising, so drumming-up SEO business (or even a search startup ...) is seeming less cost-effective right now. So that's looking like it'll be pushed-off a bit at least. Anybody still around waiting for me to do that? I suspect any "search" readers I picked up from the Google Yahoo size investigation are either gone by now, or it takes a lot to drive them off :-).
I owe someone an article, and I should do a current explanatory post about being driven to personally quit the fight for the DMCA censorware exemption, and maybe a retrospective. But beyond that and any treading-water posts, life trumps blogging.
By Seth Finkelstein | posted in statistics | on November 08, 2005 01:01 AM (Infothought permalink)
You do have a "subscribe feedster" button on your website, and their software is notoriously glitchy.
By the way, 11 livejournal readers is an indication that you're a popular fella. Most bloggers don't even have a chance to be honored with a livejournal feed; the site is not known for its RSS capabilities.
Right, I have a Feedster sub button - but the behavior of the numbers being reported seems inaccurate.
There's some sort of syndication into LiveJournal, where an RSS feed can be mirrored in their system.
You have to be a paid user to add one, and only 10-20% of the active users know what RSS is.
As someone with a huge LJ following, a couple tips for managing it:
LJ users can (and often do) leave comments in the LJ syndicated entry rather than on the host blog. Some popular feeds inspire hyuuuge discussion threads that the feed owner may never even see.
The easiest way to check for comments is to use the monthly view, like so: http://www.livejournal.com/users/infothought/2005/10 and http://www.livejournal.com/users/infothought/2005/11. [I update my bookmark links monthly.]
LJ only preserves syndicated entries for two weeks (which is why I included October in the links above) and then they go poof into the ether. So that should give you some idea of how often you need to check back for updates, and possibly save any comments you wish to keep.
If you ever want to know the identities of your LJ subscribers, paid LJ users can conduct directory searches. The URL to do so for your feed would be http://www.livejournal.com/directory.bml?fr_user=infothought. But again, that would only work for a paid user, so you'll have to make that request of someone else.
Hope this comes in handy!
Lis, thanks for all that useful info. But, again, I have all of eleven (11) LiveJournal readers, so I don't think that comments there are going to be significant.