Yesterday, as I was working on transitioning away from del.icio.us and Ma.gnolia and returning to Miniblog for With a linkness, I found some odd things in my FeedBurner stats. It seems that twice as many hits were coming from a re-burned version of my feed than from subscribers of my feed. This got me all in a huff, and I set out to fix things.

While I got closure from FeedBurner, I found it odd that I no longer know any of the visitors of the site. Most of the internet friends I've built over the years don't use RSS, and they only show up here occasionally. Most of the time the response to my query of whether they'd read something I wrote earlier was, "no." I now no longer bother asking, and I just provide a link, since I know they haven't read it.

Which makes me wonder, "who are these people reading my feed?" At one point, I could tell by IP address all the visitors to this site. Since there were only three or four, it's not that hard of a job. Now, with my current setup, it's hard to tell who's reading at all.

I'm in favor of the full-content RSS feed, and idea further explained at Digital Inspiration. Then again, there's always merit to cutting them down. Or, you can go all crazy and start a petition. I like my full feeds, mainly because I've got several safeguards in place, and because a splogger will use partial content feeds the exact same way.

When I brought MacStansbury.com out of hibernation, I decided to cut out the comments. Not because I don't love the comments, or because I was afraid of a lack of comments, it was because I was tired of responding. The community aspects of a blog, message board*****, website, social media site just don't have the same draw to me as they once did.

This leads to another problem; since it's difficult to interact with the site, you don't...interact with the site. Without the chance to interact (most commonly with comments), you don't know who's reading the site. Even then, enough people lurk on any given site that you'd never know who they all are.

So, what to do about it? Nothing, really. Just thinking out loud, musing on how we'll never know where all these hits are coming from. I can't even imagine what it would be like to have massive, TechCrunch-like stats.

And...something tells me I won't have to worry about that.

But I am grateful that I do have subscribers. That there's more than 1 fills me with amazement. That, and the continued readership from non-RSS dinosaurs makes it fun to come in here and ramble on about whatever shiny objects flash in front of my face.

Thanks for reading.

*(For those of you wondering, MacStansbury.com started its life out solely as a message board. The other things like linking and blogging came much later. Where it not for the [adult swim] message board, I would probably still be messing with phpBB. And, yeah, I stole the [ ] idea from them.)

status: published
lastmod: '2006-12-08T20:48:17.000Z'
author: John Stansbury
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