Working at Home on the Internet

FeedBurner COULD Help Fight Content Scrapers IF They Wanted To

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 If you remember, the other day I wrote about how “Did You Rob Bill Gates Blog is a Thief” was stealing content from this blog’s RSS Feeds. It still is. Not only from me, but from many others as well.

I did a couple of things to try to alleviate the problem of content theft.

Here is a few of the things I have done.

• I commented on their blog asking and then telling them to stop using my content without my permission.
• I contacted AdSense  (Google) stating that they (that blog) were infringing on my copyrighted material to no avail.
• I searched for and Blocked their IP address so they couldn’t access the blog directly.
• I even added a line “IF YOU ARE READING THIS ON “DID YOU ROB BILL GATES”, IT IS STOLEN CONTENT! PLEASE DO NOT CLICK ON ANY ADS, IT WILL ONLY ENCOURAGE THIS THIEF!’ to the Copyright in the footer of the RSS Feed, which showed on their blog.

All with no discernible result.

However, there COULD be another way to solve the problem of SPLOGS Scraping Feeds, at least on FeedBurner.

As you can see from the above, they have this report in Feed Statistics called “Uncommon Uses“.

 So, they already have an idea of people, bots and IP’s that are doing things that are a bit out of the norm. They even give you the option of telling FeedBurner that you know can trust the URL that they have tagged.

However, they only let you tell FB that you know the URL but they do Nothing with it. They don’t give you the option of Blocking it.

Since they can already track who or what is subscribed to your RSS, it makes sense that they have the ability to Block That Subscriber.

I think they should give us the option of Blocking Scrapers, especially since they can already identify them.

What do you think? Should FeedBurner give users the option of Blocking Scrapers in the Uncommon Uses portion of the reports?

July 29th, 2008 at 04:29pm | Posted by Joe | FeedBurner, RSS, Spam | 3 reader remarks | Print This Post

I Hope FeedBurner Stats Are a Glitch

 Is it just me? Did I get less interesting? Am I not providing interesting reading to my readers?

Let me show you a picture to give you an idea of what I’m talking about.

 

That is my FeedBurner stats as of this morning.

Then I read Darren’s Post  and hope that he is right. That this is only a glitch with FeedBurner and I didn’t really lose so many subscribers all in one day. It started to make me think that I should just give up and go back to Tree Work to make a living.

Oh, well. Tomorrow will tell.

November 4th, 2007 at 12:22pm | Posted by Joe | FeedBurner, Stastics | 2 reader remarks | Print This Post

My Choice for a Total Stats Package

Did I finally find the Stats Package I was looking for?

I may have.

 FeedFlare by FeedBurner.

I have had FeedFlare set up for my FeedBurner feed for quite some time. It provides a way for subscribers to E-mail, tag, share, comment and interact with a site. Now, if you use FeedFlare, you can get statistics for your Blog as well as for your Feed on your FeedBurner account.

I have just had it running for the Blog for a couple of days, so I’ll reserve the right to change my mind. But so far, it seems to be comparable to most other stats packages that I have used on my Blogs. If you are already familiar with FeedBurner stats for feeds, then the Site Stats will be easy enough to follow.

In the FeedFlare Site Stats package you get…

• Dashboard… This gives you some of the basic figures for your site at a glance. The percentages of new readers, from searches, came from (other) sites and landed directly on your site. It also gives Top Pages, Top Incoming Traffic Sources and Top Outgoing Links. 
• Visitors… You get a good deal of info on your readers with this. Again, you get the percentages as before, but you also get a Pie Chart on the Browsers your readers use. You also get Top Cities (you better know the flags of different countries), Top Languages, Top Operating Systems and Top Screen Resolutions.
• Pages… Tells you how many visitors and how many pageviews you have up to the 1/2 hour. It also gives you the Top 10 Pages viewed on your site and how many views of each individual page.
• Incoming… This is broken down into your Traffic Sources by visit which are further broken down into Top Search Engines and Top Referring Domains.
• Outgoing… You get a pretty good idea of where, within your site, or clicking on links you have provided, your readers are going.

To see what the Statistics pages look like for my Blog, continue on after the break…

» continue reading »

February 6th, 2007 at 06:26am | Posted by Joe | FeedBurner, Reviews, Stastics | 1 reader remark | Print This Post