Tracking RSS annoyances
I'm starting to see a trend in syndication feeds that I don't much care for - the inclusion of 1x1 pixel graphics in each item. The theory being to find out how many people are actually reading the items, I suppose. Meanwhile, it adds an extra - and of absolutely no value to the end viewer - http fetch to each item viewing. It's getting to be enough to tempt me to take BottomFeeder offline before reading news.
Comments
what if it makes the content better
[Jackson] April 19, 2006 23:06:52.498
There is really no other way for bloggers to know what content is actually getting read. It is only marginally useful thought since some readers (i.e. bloglines) display all posts when a user opens a site in an aggregator. I do think that know which content is actually read might help some bloggers deliver better content. I am working on a content analytics package (statzen.com) that tracks usage statistics for blogs viewed via the web and aggregators. I do use the technique that you are describing, but unfortunately there is no better way to get the information. On the other hand, if you look at the extraneous http requests from aggregators polling for new content you will see that there is a much greater amount of 'unnecessary' http request from polling then by notification from these 1x1 images. I think that polling feeds results in 10 times the traffic of web browsing while resulting in a tenth as much content being viewed. Both sides are inefficient, but damn if it isn't useful.
[Aristotle Pagaltzis] April 20, 2006 2:58:58.366
"Just" precache all images (and any other associated inlined content) when a post first comes down the wire, much like podcasts. That's a very useful feature for people who read offline (on the train, say) anyway, and it'll make the webbugs a) unannoying b) useless.
The 1x1 image tracker
[ James Robertson] April 20, 2006 7:28:48.399
Comment by James Robertson
As Aristotle says above, pre-fetching destroys the utility of this as a tracking tool. And lots of aggregators do it. Heck, if you use BottomFeeder in Newspaper mode, you get a whole bunch of those fetches at once.
They could do away with the full text feeds
[ Troy Brumley] April 20, 2006 9:09:08.845
Comment by Troy Brumley
That way, hits on the direct article would be more meaningful.
This kinda wanders into an author's rights area--how much are they entitled to know about their readers' habits.