I suppose this is a LazyWeb request for info…
Does anyone (especially the good folks at FeedBurner and Pheedo…) have a definitive guide to how the various RSS Services report user/subscriber counts via their user-agent string?
With some agents, it’s pretty obvious; Yahoo FeedSeeker, Bloglines and NewsGator all report via “Users” or “Subscribers”.
With some, it would appear obvious, but it’s broken; “TribeASS” (I ain’t making it up folks) reports “%d” users… Hey guys, at least use an unsigned int for my vast subscriber counts, alright? (Laugh.)
With still others, it’s entirely unclear. For example, I see “Apple Syndication/38” in my logs; does that mean that it’s the 38th process instance running on their server, or, are there 38 people who subscribe to my blog via Apple’s Tiger RSS implementation, or??
Any and all help appreciated; if a list doesn’t exist, I’m happy to compile all comments into a list to be shared. If it exists, I’d be happy with a pointer… and if a log analyzer exists to extract, trend and render this data… well, that’d be just peachy.
Thanks!
UPDATE: Dick Costolo, CEO FeedBurner, bails me out in the comments (reposted here): “Hey Tony, we’ve got this. In fact, we just posted yesterday on our blog that it’s on our list to open up our user-agent db with ALL the parameters from the list so that others can make any additions, corrections or criticisms that they’d like. I’ll kick start the process by noting that in the apple syndication bot, “38” is just a static string, it’s the same for everybody. Probably a final build number or something. Anyway, we’ll make this public as soon as possible. Also in the list will be web-based readers that have multiple users but don’t report them. There’s more data in the db than you’ll get from analyzing logs, (eg, does or doesn’t support Atom1.0, does or doesn’t support images, etc).”
That’s what I get for not getting through all 800 posts yesterday! Dick, this is great news, thank you!
Hey Tony, we’ve got this. In fact, we just posted yesterday on our blog that it’s on our list to open up our user-agent db with ALL the parameters from the list so that others can make any additions, corrections or criticisms that they’d like. I’ll kick start the process by noting that in the apple syndication bot, “38” is just a static string, it’s the same for everybody. Probably a final build number or something. Anyway, we’ll make this public as soon as possible. Also in the list will be web-based readers that have multiple users but don’t report them. There’s more data in the db than you’ll get from analyzing logs, (eg, does or doesn’t support Atom1.0, does or doesn’t support images, etc).