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Posts with tag: google-reader | Return to BloggersBlog.com Homepage
It's Good to Be a Bundled Feed
 Google has a post explaining the addition of subscriber numbers to its Google Reader service.
There's been a lot of discussion this weekend about the subscriber counts that have recently appeared in Reader's search results. Leaderboards have been drawn up, numbers are being compared and in some cases there's confusion as to how these numbers compare with other subscriber metrics. Additionally, we've made changes (some as recently as today) as to how counts are being calculated. This is probably going to be pretty boring unless you're a feed publisher, but we thought it would be best to explain things a bit. Here are the various numbers you may come across, and what they all mean:
Google subscriber counts: These numbers include subscribers across all Google services, including Reader, iGoogle, and Orkut. You can see them in Reader's feed search results (pictured below) and the Google Webmaster Tools. Additionally, our crawler reports them to the publisher each time we fetch the feed. Reader's feed search was recently showing stale and incomplete data, but as of today (October 15) the numbers should be the same everywhere.
Mashable notes that feeds that have been included in one of the feed bundles on Google Reader tend to have the highest subscriber figures. That's probably true with any news reader that offers bundles. People are more likely to add one of the bundles which auto-subscribes them to all the feeds in the bundle. However, these readers won't necessarily become regular readers of all the feeds contained in the bundle - they may never even read a single one of the feeds. Still it would sure be nice to have your feed offered in one of the bundles. Mashable says the best way for that to happen is "by striking a deal with the feedreader company or being friends with the owner." Some of the same feeds have been bundled on Google Reader for quite a while. It would be nice if Google Reader and some of the other feed bundlers would mix it up a little bit and give other feeds a chance to be King for a while.
Posted on October 15, 2007
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Subscriber Counts Jump as Google Releases Feed Suscriber Data
 Thanks to new numbers from Google Reader we may be able to answer TechCrunch's question about just how big
Google Reader is from a few weeks. It appears that Google Reader already has a good percentage of the news reader marketshare. A few bloggers were caught
by surprise when their subscriber counts jumped this morning. Google only
just announced yesterday that they would be starting to report subscriber accounts for Google Reader and the Google personalized homepage. Some bloggers using Feedburner seem to be reporting subscriber jumps of anywhere from 15% to 50%.
Trader Mike has a good roundup of some of the Google Reader numbers bloggers are reporting. CyberNet News also has a post listing the new subscriber counts for several top blogs now that Google's subscriber numbers are included.
It looks like Google Reader's marketshare is still less than Bloglines but it is a big surprise that Google Reader is already as close as they are to the leading web-based news reader.
Posted on February 17, 2007
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Google Reader Adds Subscriber Counts to Crawler
Google has announced in the Official Google Reader blog that they will be publishing feed subscriber numbers in the crawler. Publishers have been wanting this information for a while.
Publishers have been asking us to report the number of users that are subscribed to their feeds in Google Reader. This is something we've been wanting to do for a while, but with all the products that use feeds at Google, corralling the data in one place was like herding cats. So herd we did, and as of today, our crawler reports the number of Google users subscribed to the feed. The count includes subscribers from Google Reader and the Google Personalized Homepage, and in the future may include other Google products that support feeds.
Feed publishers can find the number in their server logs. Google has posted an explanation about how to find subscriber counts here in their FAQ.
Does Google Reader report subscriber counts?
Yes, Google Reader reports subscriber counts when we crawl feeds (within the "User-Agent:" header in HTTP). Currently, these counts include users of both Google Reader and the Google Personalized Homepage, and over time will include subscriptions from other Google properties.
The "User-Agent:" header of our crawler includes the name of our crawler ("FeedFetcher-Google") along with its associated URL, the subscriber count, and a unique 64-bit feed identifier ("feed-id"). You might see multiple requests for the same feed with distinct "feed-id" values. This happens if the same feed is referenced through multiple URLs (for example, because of redirects). In that case, you will need to sum up the subscribers to a feed that have distinct "feed-id" values to determine the total number of Google subscribers to the feed.
Below is an example of the contents of the "User-Agent:" header:
User-Agent: Feedfetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html; 4 subscribers; feed-id=1794595805790851116)
Publishers may also be interested to know that MyYahoo recently started reporting subscriber counts again -- after a delay of several months. If you are not using Feedburner you might be interesting in this page on Yahoo's publisher.yahoo.com site which tells you how to track MyYahoo subscribers in your server logs. Most other news readers like Bloglines, Newsgator and Netvibes also provide subscriber counts in server logs.
Posted on February 16, 2007
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New Google Reader Feature Tracks Personal Reading Trends
The Official Google Reader blog has announced that addition of a new Google Reader feature called Reader Trends that lets you track how many items you read from the feeds you subscribe to.
The result is the Reader Trends page, accessed via a link from the "Home" page. For example, it lets me see the spike in read items two days ago (the result of my New Year's resolution of staying on top of my 322 subscriptions). There are also my subscriptions sorted by various criteria, so I can see which I'm having trouble keeping up with. Each subscription has a unsubscribe icon next to it, which I've used for those that I decided were not worth keeping around.
If you have any New Year's resolutions about time management or are a chart geek like me, trends should be useful and fun. You may discover things about your reading habits that you didn't know.
Steve Rubel would like to see the aggregate of all of this reader trends data and so would we. We would like to see how well blogs that have tons of posts each day do. How many of Engadget's or Boing Boing's daily posts do people read? Other information provide by this new Google Reader feature includes how often the feeds you subscribe to are updated and what time of day you read your feeds. Lots more coverage of this subject can be found on Techmeme.
Posted on January 4, 2007
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Google Reader Provides Linkblog Tool
Google Reader has a new tool that lets users share the favorite RSS posts they have read with others. One benefit of the shared feature for bloggers is that it can be used to create linkblogs that can be placed on a blog's sidebar. These linkblogs will update each time the blogger stars another RSS entry in their Google Reader. Ollie blogs that he has already added it as a sidebar on Dayorama.
On the right hand menu bar, below our prospects, you'll now find 'Recommended Reading'. This is a list of the most recent articles I've marked with a 'star' in Google Reader, the RSS reader I use. I'll be sure in future to mark the items I think are worth reading with a star, and they'll turn up on the right hand menu bar automatically. You can click the links to read the original articles, or follow a separate link to the home page of the website the article came from.
Google Reader developer Mihai Parparita has more about the new feature here. He explains how the shared feature can be used to splice feeds. Mihai has also added a linkblog sidebar to his site using the new sharing feature from Google.
Posted on March 26, 2006
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