What kind of information can I pull from RSS feeds?

What kind of information can I pull from RSS feeds?

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Smart Source Data Collector

Last Modified: 7/6/2009

Introduction:
RSS tracking is very different from tracking a website due to the nature of RSS. RSS readers come in many flavors and on any number of devices from Web Browser apps to portable gaming systems to mobile phones. The RSS experience usually starts as a link on a website. A user then clicks the link and subscribe to a feed by adding the RSS link to their client RSS reader. That RSS reader periodically requests an XML file provided by the target site without having to interact with the original website.

Process:
A tagging solution can capture the client side click to the RSS icons within your website. You can use this to approximate the number of subscriptions to the feed. If you have a resource to create Webtrends coding within the RSS server, then there are many data points which can be captured. These include: * Tracking RSS feed name and article name related to: Feed requests – i.e. a request to the RSS server for content Article clickthrough – i.e. people clicking on a link within the RSS feed to take them to your site Post/item views – i.e. number of times an embedded image in the XML is rendered RSS Aggregator used – i.e. the Agent for the request. What cannot be tracked: Examples: * Subscribing/viewing RSS within a web browser For example, view this link via IE: http://msexchangeteam.com/rss.aspx. RSS servers deliver information in XML format, which does not support the use of javascript. Therefore, traffic cannot be captured from the client side. * Subscribing/viewing RSS within an RSS aggregator Examples of RSS aggregators are NewsGator, FeedReader, SharpReader, etc. Since these are client applications, it is not possible to capture traffic. * Subscribing/viewing RSS within a portal based aggregator Examples of portal based aggregators are MyYahoo and iGoogle. In this case, the RSS data is shown inside a webpage owned by a different site which we cannot access to place tracking scripts.

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