The Guardian Technology blog linked to a list on Mashable.com titled “My Soul, and 10 Other Things that Google Owns“. It’s a fairly obvious list of things that Google do to rule your life. Many of them apply to me – I use Google Calendar and Google Reader all the time. Google Maps is pretty good for mapping although I wish they’d open up a UK geocoder in their API. Jack Schofield thinks the most interesting one is “My paycheck”, maybe, but not for me – but please click the adverts and prove me wrong!
For me, the interesting one is the recent announcement that Google is to buy Feedburner.
With its acquisition of Feedburner, Google now controls the leading company for managing RSS feeds. Thus, Google knows everything about my readers – how many of them there are, where they come from, and how they access my content. How might Google use this information? Targeting ads in my feeds based on context or geography sounds like a start, but using cookies the company could also theoretically collect data on my readers and better tailor ads to them throughout Google’s product line.
Feedburner is a really cool service – it allows you to track statistics on your feeds and see how many people are reading your site and in what types of RSS reader. But I’ve always had a major problem with Feedburner – the way they suggest you redirect your feed to their servers. This means that as soon as a user subscribes to your feed you lose control over how they access your site. I’m constantly amazed that people are willing to sign over their feeds to Feedburner just to get some stats or a few bucks from advertising revenue.
I am interested in better stats on my blog though, and as much as I wish there was an open source system that was able to give me good information about who’s reading the site, I can’t find one. So I set out looking for a way to use Feedburner without signing my soul away and with a bit of help from Google knocked up this bit of mod_rewrite magic:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^FeedBurner.*
RewriteRule ^feed/ http://feeds.feedburner.com/MichaelNolan?format=xml [P,L]
All it does is check to see if it’s the Feedburner feed fetcher requesting my feed, and if it is return the RSS feed, otherwise we proxy the content of the Feedburner feed which adds to our stats. The only downside I’ve noticed so far is that all stats appear to come from the UK, where my server is hosted. I can live with that.
Strangely, this failure could be corrected by Google. If Feedburner was brought into the Google Apps feature-set rather than just Analytics/Adsense then they could allow you to host stats under your own domain, thus protecting the security of your feed.
hi mike…glad you like our service.
just wanted to let you know that the wordpress plugin (from steve smith) does exactly as you suggested and we also let publisehrs know that they can do the rewrite on their own. additionally, we have a service called mybrand that allows publishers to use a subdomain that we host thru a dns trick…so, feeds.donloeb.com/
we definitely want publishers to have as much control and flexibility as possible.
let me know if you have any questions…
thanks!
don loeb
vp partner services
feedburner
From what I can see, that plugin does a 307 redirect and so you still set URL address bar to be the Feedburner address. This might have been fine in the days before auto discovery and browsers knowing what to do with feeds and you had to copy and paste the address in, but now most people are learning to click on the little orange feed icon and as soon as they do that, they’re off your server.
MyBrand is exactly what I want, but I’d rather not pay even the £2.99 they’re asking. Maybe if I were making money on my blog I would, but my server hosting cost more than enough already, thankyou!