Re: [syndication] Accounting for aggregated views

[Jeremy Zawodny <jzawodn@yahoo-inc.com>]

On Fri, Jun 25, 2004 at 12:24:12PM -0700, Mark Fletcher wrote:
> Dimitri Glazkov wrote:
> 
> >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.
> >
> >  
> >
> One would hope that the aggregator in question does something like what 
> we've been doing with Bloglines since the beginning. The Bloglines 
> crawler includes the subscriber count in the user-agent string we send 
> with every request for a given feed. That makes it really easy for 
> content providers to accurately track the number of subscribers they 
> have on Bloglines (something you can't do with desktop aggregators).

We copied the idea for the My Yahoo! RSS module.  Our bot leaves a
signature like this in my logs:

66.218.65.53 - - [24/Jun/2004:22:50:31 -0700] "GET /blog/rss2.xml HTTP/1.0" 200 34044 "-" "YahooFeedSeeker/1.0 (compatible; Mozilla 4.0; MSIE 5.5; http://my.yahoo.com/s/publishers.html; users 687; views 102167)"

I also documented this in a blog poast a few months back:

  http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/001789.html

Mark, thanks for the idea. :-)

Jeremy
-- 
Jeremy D. Zawodny, <jzawodn@yahoo-inc.com>
Technical Yahoo - Yahoo MySQL Geek
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