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back in march, my friend and blogger extraordinaire, stan schroeder decided to test another metric for ranking site popularity. he created a list of top blogs based on the number of rss subscribers they had according to feedburner. apart from some shortcomings (i.e. since feedburner doesn’t release a list of its own and many sites don’t display the data publicly, the list would be incomplete, and that he only covered content written in english and on blogs) the list seemed like a great idea and got a lot of traction when it was initially posted. a more recent post by allen, however, has me rethinking my initial reaction to stan’s experiment.

allen asks the question, are ‘rss subscriber’ equal to ‘hits’? by hits, he is referring to the old and horribly inaccurate measure that would rate popularity based on the number of total elements retrieved from your site in a given time.

Add in another 10 blank gifs and you have 10 more hits per page load, awesome! Imagine if we had 100 blank gifs, even more awesome! And so the story goes. Luckily the industry quickly moved to page views. I still wonder how much was paid out due to the marketing of “hits” as a metric.

and now with still-inaccurate measures and new web technologies like ajax making the page view irrelevant, we find ourselves looking for other measures, one of which as stan decided to test, is rss subscribers.

the problem with rss subscribers, as allen points out, is that not all subscribers actively read the sites they are subscribed to. the more accurate measure, one that feedburner calculates and shows to the site-owner but doesn’t publicly report, is your site’s ‘reach’, calculated as the number of people who are actually taking an action on your content (viewing it within a reader or clicking on it to come to your site and reading it there).

If we look at popular start pages Netvibes and Pageflakes, both provide a set of default feeds upon initial page load. Using Pageflakes as the example, TechCrunch (the 580,000 listed above) is a default feed. This means that anyone who loads Pageflakes.com is now a Subscriber of the TechCrunch feed.

An example from Netvibes would be Yahoo Sports feed. And any load of Netvibes.com equates to another Subscriber for Yahoo Sports. With both of these sites having Alexa rankings under 10k, I can only imagine that they must see some nice traffic. But what happens if that new Netvibes user doesn’t click anything on the Yahoo Sports feed or minimizes it? They are still reported as a subscriber.

at the same time, it is important to note that the gap between subscribers and reach is significantly narrowed the lower down you go on the list popular blogs. the inflated numbers problem only applies to the top blogs that enjoy the luxury of being set as default on popular content aggregators and while rss subscribers maybe an inaccurate measure for these blogs, it may very well be a good measure for relatively less popular destinations.

back in january i wrote a little piece on some of the use off rss on various different levels of digg that many people simply didn’t (and probably still don’t) know about and consequently weren’t taking advantage of. now, thanks to dave winer and michael arrington, similar information about facebook is coming to light. for example,

I’ve found some more RSS feeds in Facebook’s UI.
1. Friends Status Updates. Look for the subscription link in the lower right corner.
2. Friends Posted Items. Again, look in the lower right corner.

while it has been pointed out that this isn’t a new feature, this is certainly the first time we’re hearing substantial buzz around this and how this may signal a shift in people’s perception of the social network as a ‘walled garden’. it’s also interesting to note that the use of rss allows users to access this information without having to visit the site.

currently accessible feeds include friends’ status updates, posted items, and notifications.

i have to admit, i have been a long time proponent of using full feeds, but for some reason, in spite of everyone arguing in favor of full feeds, some people just don’t listen. the latest of these ‘some people’ is the nytimes which recently acquired the freakonomics blog.

While there were a few congratulations thrown in, the vast majority of the comments on the blog when the news broke was to complain about the NY Times’ decision to switch the RSS feed from full text to partial text, where anyone who wanted to read the whole thing would have to click through.

knowing dubner and levitt, i wouldn’t be surprised if they got freakonomicsy with it and wrote a post on why full feeds don’t result in fewer page views. for now, mike has some great points on why full feeds can work wonders for you.

Full text feeds makes the reading process much easier. It means it’s that much more likely that someone reads the full piece and actually understands what’s being said — which makes it much, much, much more likely that they’ll then forward it on to someone else, or blog about it themselves, or post it to Digg or Reddit or Slashdot or Fark or any other such thing — and that generates more traffic and interest and page views from new readers, who we hope subscribe to the RSS feed and become regular readers as well.

in the wake of recent unfounded rumors about aol shutting down the new netscape (and the official response), allen stern has an interview with tom drapeau, director of netscape (read: elite ninja). here are some interesting bits:

so what is netscape?

Netscape means different things to different people, as it has had a long and storied history. Today’s Netscape is focused on helping people find the things they are looking for, which is a shared concept with the social news site, start page, and browser.

what’s the team at netscape like?

The Netscape team is a pleasure to work with. The talent, dedication, and energy they bring to the product is refreshing. We have writers, reporters, engineers, and designers on staff, all of whom work remotely (we have staff in New York and Orlando, Las Vegas and Los Angeles, and all parts in between). The ideas that come out of this group are truly amazing, and their execution is tremendous. The team brings great joy to building fun products, which makes my job pretty simple.

is netscape a digg clone?

I have a lot of good things to say about Digg. However, Netscape has a very different community of folks contributing to the site, and the Netscape model differs from Digg in our editorial approach. I would say that Digg inspired aspects of Netscape.com, but I would say that it isn’t fair to label Netscape a clone. I feel that as long as Netscape maintains a growing, thriving community, and adds to social news, it has fulfilled its purpose and should be allowed to stand on its own.

head over to allen’s site for the complete (and quite insightful) interview.

disclaimer: i’m a netscape scout

personally i’m becoming more and more annoyed with facebook since they have decided to open the network to everyone (from both a networking as well as a development point of view) but it seems that there are many others who have embraced the issues arising from these moves. not only are the users willing to add strangers to their networks but it appears that these users are unconcerned about protecting their privacy and personal information on the social networking site.

according to cnet, the i.t. security firm sophos created a fake facebook profile and added 200 random people as friends. out of those 200 people, 87 of them added the fake account as a friend and 82 of them gave the fake user access to personal information (while 5 users added the fake account with restricted access to their profiles). while the situation on facebook is much better than on myspace, users are still not as educated about the risks as one would hope.

But out of the 41 percent of those surveyed who divulged personal information to ‘Freddi,’ 72 percent provided at least one e-mail address, 84 percent gave their full date of birth, and 78 percent gave a current location (whether an address or just a city). More alarmingly, 23 percent provided a phone number and 26 percent provided an instant messaging screen name.

while the sample used by sophos was small, assuming it was truly random, the results are alarming. even more so considering the report from the nsba downplaying the security risks faced by uninitiated users online.

it’s no joke that alexa statistics are off the mark but who would’ve thought that they were this loony? techcrunch is reporting today that according to alexa, youtube is bigger than google. go figure!

as if instances like these aren’t enough of a kick in the pants for alexa, the fact that newcomers to the space are already doing a much better job than the incumbent leader should seal its fate. here’s a look at some more sane measurements.

daily unique visitors as measured by quantcast:

monthly unique visitors as measured by compete:

a couple of days since publishing the code for the facebook homepage, the person behind the blog facebook secrets is back and this time he’s published the code for facebook search.

it is also worthwhile to note that the person behind the blog isn’t the person behind the original leak. it seems that the real leaker is a university of oklahoma graduate by the name of Trae McNeely who posted the code first. facebook secrets copied and reposted it on the anonymous blogspot blog after the initial post was taken down for copyright infringement.

dave winer’s apology to jason calacanis (which has been accepted) is actually much more than just an apology. it is a great defense of what blogging and the blogosphere actually stand for.

If the blogosphere is about anything, it’s about discourse. So if someone has an opinion about a format or a product, not only are they allowed to express their opinion, it’s actually encouraged. It seems this is part of our shared values. So we should be very careful about characterizing mere writing as somehow harmful, or war-like. Imagine if President Bush had written a series of blog posts about Saddam Hussein instead of starting a war. Wouldn’t the world be better off if he had? (I know it’s ridiculous, but I’m making a point).

while we should all choose our words carefully so that our content doesn’t come off as a personal attack (i should know, ive been on both sides of that) we also have to keep in mind that there is no room for censorship in online media. this of course stands in contrast to fred wilson’s misguided thoughts on what blogging stands for.

I don’t really think that’s the way to make friends and influence people. Which is what blogging is all about.

pligg, the open source content management system that let’s you create socially driven sites like digg, is up for sale. included in the sale is the domain name and the website, and the sourceForge account where you can download the cms from. pligg has been controversial not only because of how it replicates digg but also because of internal troubles.

here’s a snippet from the official email confirming that the site is on the market:

The Pligg community has grown larger than ever expected, with over 10,000 registered users sharing and trading tips, more than 60,000 Sourceforge downloads and 2 IRC rooms that are active 24/7. It’s become an extremely large project and community to manage. We all have day jobs and struggle to find enough time to keep up the pace.

corank, the site that let’s you make your own socially driven site (think digg), announced yesterday that they have released their own api. while the api allows some basic calls right now and more functionality is on the way, the best part is that the api automatically applies to every site that you make using the corank system. what this means is that if you make your own digg-like site, users can make applications for your site without requiring you to release an api and simply by using the corank api.

One thing to note is that this first version of the API is read-only. That is, you can read data from your coRanking site, but you cannot use the API to write things. In other words, you can read data from stories, users, who voted what, comments, etc. but cannot use the API to cast a vote, submit a story or a comment.

We left the “write” part of the API for the next version, coming very soon. But even before the next version comes out, we’re already working on a new group of “read-only” calls to provide even more functionality and flexibility very soon, so check this blog often.

if you use the api and feel something is missing (apart from the features that are already under construction), be sure to let them know.