I suppose it makes things simpler for people who weren’t already doing something similar for feeds, and at least they are segregating clicks between email and RSS, something their competitors for RSS > Email such as Aweber, Feedblitz, Mailchimp etc have been able to do for a long time.

What they can’t do is track RSS signups as a goal, and until they can do that from a marketing perspective RSS is fairly useless.

Google Reader is also still misbehaving – even if you use a 307 temporary redirect to your Feedburner URL, Feedburner evaluates the URL before offering the feed for subscription. You end up with split URLs in Google Reader depending on the signup method.

Http://andybeard.eu/feed

Http://andybeard.eu/feed/

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Exploring-Niche-Websites

I have read of ways using iframes to spoof the signup process a little, but from a marketing perspective it isn’t really acceptable and no substitute for a real thank you page process that can also be defined as a goal.

Google still is driving the assumption that RSS should be free to share, and not measured, but they are losing that battle to Twitter – they have no support for authenticated RSS feeds, and you can’t prevent people sharing RSS content that might be personal, either sensitive data or paid subscription.

This severely limits the utility of RSS for paid subscription content, RSS use to monitor collaboration services, etc.

It is also a financial risk – ever licensed an image from IstockPhoto? I am not a lawyer but…

What happens if that image, which is licensed for 500,000 impressions ends up on the Digg home page and is spread virally accross the internet? At $1 per hundred additional viewers, an image that is seen by an additional 500,000 could set you back $5000 – Istockphoto are owned by Getty, hardly known for being generous to accidental image plagiarism.

Feedburner team… what happened to that open directory of Pingshot ping locations? Hell even just a current list of where you update would be better than nothing.

Om Malik recently reported on Alexa outages as large as 14 hours.

I still like using Alexa as a way to compare websites. But it is just one yardstick, and should only be used comparing websites in the same niche. If one webmaster uses Alexa and another doesn’t within a small niche, the difference in rating can be extremely high.

Alexa isn’t Just Down

I have noticed over the last week that Alexa wasn’t updating their statistics. They were frozen on 22nd November. Not just my own site statistics, but also for sites like CNN and Google.

Today is the first time that statistics have been updated for 6 days, and Alexa are now shoing statistics for… November 23rd.

This isn’t the same as an outage. There seems to be something going on behind the scenes.
They have still been gathering data, but not displaying the processed results.

Lots of tracking services have some level of delay, Google Analytics has a delay. MyBlogLog has a delay, unless you subscribe to their pro version.

Is this something to do with data centre migration or a technical hitch? If that was the case I would expect to see results today for November up until 28th now that things are moving again.

Alexa May Have Made Changes

The way that the data is appearing suggests to me that maybe Alexa have made some changes in the way data is being processed, and that it will take them a while to catch up.

Only time will tell.