Who’s Linking to Your Site? - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 100

FeedBur ner
if you don't mind spending a little money and you want some real precise numbers about who's
reading your rss feed, sign up for FeedBurner (feedburner.com). it costs $4.99 a month (for up
to three feeds) and provides a huge amount of statistical information about your feed, including
how many people are subscribed to it and in what rss feed readers, which items on your feed
are getting clicked, and what user-agents and search engine 'bots are visiting your feed. For the
Web wrangler who really wants to know what her visitors are looking at, FeedBurner would be
cheap at twice the price!
Now, will knowing how many people read your feed using Bloglines tell you
how many people overall read your feed using every possible RSS reader? No.
But it can give you a good sense of whether you're popular (is anyone reading
your RSS feed?). And it may be that you have more readers than you think.
Moving from Internal to External Information
Internal information, like URLs, numbers of readers, and content, covers
a lot of the basic stuf that deines the information you provide online and
reveals what your readers are like—the kind of community you are generat-
ing. If you own or manage a business, it's probably obvious to you that you
need to track this. But even if you're not a business owner or manager, the
knowledge of what kind of readership you have on your Web site, what they
say about it, and how they link to it can be immensely valuable.
Now let's move further out from internal information to the sites and topics
that interest you but don't necessarily involve you. Let's move to external
information and where to ind it.