Re: [syndication] Accounting for aggregated views

["Bill Kearney" <wkearney@syndic8.com>]

> Imagine a portal application, which uses RSS to aggregate information
> from various Internet sources. Obviously, in order to improve
> performance, the application only reads the source of syndication once
> in a specified interval and then delivers the cached data by request
> to the portal users.
>
> If I am an owner of the content that is syndicated in this way, my
> statistics will look rather skewed -- I can only see one hit every so
> often, and the fact that my content is viewed somewhere else by
> multiple viewers is completely hidden from me. Sounds mighty unfair,
> doesn't it? Almost like bootlegging.
>
> Are there any efforts to correct this injustice? Any methods? Ideas?

Injustice?  I'm not sure that's the right term.

Consider the train wreck that would happen if you got a hit for each-and-every
page view when a portal viewer loaded the web page containing you item(s).  The
traffic might be a lot more than your monthly bandwidth quota is capable of
handling.  That is, without running into over-usage charges.  Granted, bad
aggregator programs configured to poll too frequently are also a problem.

CDF attempted to address this issue by providing a way for a consuming program
to 'upload' a log report.  That degree of functionality was never implemented in
RSS (any of the versions).

Combine this with a general sense from the audience that they do not want to
tell you.  The readers don't want to be tallied up.

To most folks that decry the lack of page view counting, I encourage them to
make use of feed-specific URLs and teaser text in the feeds.  Put text into the
feed that invites the user to come back to the website to learn more.  And use a
feed-specific URL so you'll know the landing page was arrived at from something
that consumed the feed XML (instead of regular HTML browsers).  You could,
conceivably, generate an entirely unique RSS feed for each 'entity' that
retrieved it.  This would probably be more of a drain on the server's CPU that
is practical.  Not to mention the usual hassles of determining just whether or
not the remote requester is 'unique' or not.

There are, from time to time, various people that make noises about RSS not
being capable of surviving or growing unless it succumbs to the use of cookies
or other view-tracking techniques.  It seems these folks are WRONG.  We've seen
better than 20,000 new feeds come online just the first half of this year alone.
Sure, a lot of it's fluff or personal weblog stuff but there are a lot of
heavy-hitters like BBC and Reuters playing along.

Yes, in an advertiser's perfect world there'd be a way for them to fold, spindle
and mutilate your every download, read, bookmark and forward of anything in an
RSS feed.  Fortunately most of us know better than to tolerate that sort of
foolishness..

To the folks that say they hate using teaser feeds then my response is then
you'll have to live without having more detailed web statistics.  This is also
how I respond to the folks that refuse to play along with RSS unless they can
get the stats.  Provide lead-in copy in the free feeds and require that the
users login to use full content feeds.  All decent aggregator programs support
user authentication.  This won't give you per-item view stats but it will let
you know if a user is downloading the feed.

And if the site has enough resources to setup and run user logins then it
probably also has enough to support altering the feeds themselves to have
per-reader unique URLs in the items.   I'm sure some folks would find this a
horrendous intrustion on their so-called privacy.  Yeah, just like the police
from Casablanca "shocked, shocked!".  Then it's a simple matter to handle
cross-referencing the inbound use of those URLs back against the user profiles.
This still doesn't help if you want page-views on the feeds.  To get that fine
grained a sampling you need to play games with embedded web bugs (invisible
gifs) and such.  These are likewise considered quite the pox on humanity but
alas some folks insist on trying to use them.  A great many newsreader programs
don't display the content using HTML so these bugs won't work (and are just a
waste of embedded HTML nonsense).

In short, yes, as one of the most successful ways to publish content ever
devised, RSS does not give you, the publish, invasively specific statistics.  I
think many folks would argue that's a good thing.

-Bill Kearney