January 31, 2005
To burn your feed and own it it, too
So this is what happens when Dave Winer cites one of your entries and goes to sleep. Thanks for all your comments and linkage.
When the use of a tracking bug was mentioned as possible way to throw FeedBurner statistics at your local feed, I asked on the FeedBurner forums:
For those of us hellbent on keeping their feeds on their own server, have you ever thought of offering FeedBurner's feed statistics through a tracking bug? Users would insert a small image with the FeedBurner logo into their fulltext feeds. The image would reside on FeedBurner's servers and should allow you to pull all the referer information you need.
People who can't or don't want to do the temporary redirect trick would get an alternative way to enjoy FeedBurner's service and word of FeedBurner would be spread even further (eventually readers will wonder about the FeedBurner icons in the posts they subscribe to).
To which FeedBurner's Matt Shobe replied:
Thanks for the suggestion. At this time we're considering a number of options for "off-property" statistics tracking, and we may offer new services that deliver a variation of what you suggest here. It's certainly something we've heard before and we totally understand that some publishers want to self-manage their feed URL, RSS bandwidth usage, and related issues. Your point on additional publicity via image display isn't lost on us, either. ;)
Again, thanks for adding your vote on this service enhancement. We hope to hear from you again when we've rolled out our next statistics-related features.
I'm curious what they have in mind.
