Last week I wrote about my blog’s subscription growth,
inspired by Jon Udell’s analysis of Bloglines Public
Subscribers. In a subsequent email discussion with Jon Udell, we both wondered
whether Feedburner data would show similar trends to the Bloglines data. Jon suggested a
collaborative project could be launched in the blogosphere with the aim of calibrating
the Bloglines data. Of course I thought this was a great idea, so I contacted Dick Costolo and Eric Lunt from Feedburner to ask if they’d be willing to help. Dick
and Eric were very enthusiastic about the idea and Eric soon whipped up a couple of
templates for us, accessible via RESTish URLs.
How to access your Feedburner stats in XHTML or XML
Eric came up with two new templates for Feedburner users to output their statistics in
XHTML and XML.
1. The XHTML template is similar to the format Jon used in his Bloglines analysis.
Here’s the URL to get to it:
http://feedburner.com/fb/a/stats?id=12345&dateRangeName=
all&format=table
Note: replace the “12345” above with your Feedburner ID
2. The other template provides pure XML and you can get to it using this URL:
http://feedburner.com/fb/a/stats?id=12345&dateRangeName=
all&format=xml
You need to log in to your account to use these URLs – and don’t forget to replace the
“12345” bit with your own Feedburner ID. You can specify the date range too.
This is basically an alternative interface to your Feedburner statistics, for those of
you who have an account there. It’s a way to output your Feedburner statistics as
well-formed XML, making it ripe for analysis! Here are my Feedburner stats to show you
what it outputs (I’ll analyze my own stats in a future post): R/WW xhtml and R/WW xml.
Call for Data
For the next part of this collaborative project, I’d like to ask Feedburner account
holders to publish their data on the Web in one of the above formats. The idea being that
those analyst pundits amongst us can combine the contributed data to get a better view of
RSS subscription growth in the blogosphere.
To do this, post your data in either the XHTML or XML format to your blog – or
elsewhere on the Web. Make sure you tag your post so people can find it – e.g. link to
the Technorati tag feedgrowth, or tag it in del.icio.us as feedgrowth, or ping The Topic Exchange’s new
feedgrowth page.
Anyone can then collate all this data and do their own analysis on it. So not only are
we collaboratively sharing our Feedburner data, we’ll hopefully collaboratively
analyze it too. I’m kind of hoping some people create cool visualizations with the
data, much like folks did with
Tom Coates’ MT data last year. I will certainly link to you if you do, but more
importantly perhaps Jon Udell will too!
btw if you do want to participate, but don’t want your data to be public – you could
strip out the identity details from your XHTML/XML data and email the file(s) to me at
readwriteweb AT gmail DOT com. We’re interested in the aggregate trends and how
they compare to Bloglines data.
Finally, it should be noted that Feedburner circulation data is not quite the same as
Bloglines subscription data. Circulation is “an approximate measure of the number of
individuals for whom your feed has been requested in the last 24 hours” and it can
fluctuate a bit (particularly in the weekends, when circulation routinely drops). However
there are potentially a lot of useful trends and insights about RSS
subscription growth to be gained via this project – so I encourage you to contribute your
data! 🙂
