Re: [syndication] Accounting for aggregated views

[Dimitri Glazkov <dimitri.glazkov@gmail.com>]

> 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.

That definitely would be a train wreck. However, that is not what I
was asking about.
 
> 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).

Thanks for the pointer -- I wold've never thought to look at CDF.

> 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.

A very valid point. I would just add that most of the time it comes
down to some sort of trade-off between privacy and desire to access
content.

> 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.

Yes, this is a possible solution. But don't you think it solves a
generic problem with a specific implementation? In other words, there
is no standard way of implementing this behavior. Is there?

> 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.

Umm.. I am not saying that RSS is not going to survive -- I don't have
enough credentials to say something like that, but both you and I know
that fast rate of the format adoption does not necessarily equate to
this format being perfect.

> 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.

But why? Why do they have to live with that? If there is a real need
for something, why not attempt to address it?
 
> 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).

I am glad you brought these up. All of this hacky nonsense is exactly
what motivated me to make the initial post on this topic.

I am going to go out on a limb here, but from my observations, the
following is true most of the time:

The absense of an accessible, standardized way to address a specific
need results in having this need addressed using workarounds, the
consequences of which are usually less than desirable and produce
exponentially more grief than developing the standard in the first
place.

The Internet has given us junk email, pop-ups, and numerous lesser
evils of the Web exactly because of that.

So, what I am trying to do is start a discussion on the "right" way to
account for aggregated views.

:DG<