Written on February 28th, 2006 at 11:02 pm by Darren Rowse
New Feedburner Stats Will Help Track Content Thieves
TechCrunch reports that Feedburner are about to roll out new statistics that will take their service into some interesting new directions. What interests me most about what they are doing is that they are adding a service that will identify where your feed is being used.
This will help to track those people who are republishing RSS feeds automatically, including both those who might be doing it legitimately with your permission - but also those who are not and who are writing spam blogs and infringing copyright. This is a killer app as far as I’m concerned and if it works will remove my main barrier to publishing full feeds on my blog. Here’s how Dick Costolo describes this aspect of the update:
‘Uncommon uses. We track 200k feeds and so we see everywhere feeds are used regularly. When we see someplace a feed is referenced or clicked that we don’t recognize as a common reference, we highlight it here in the dashboard and on the detailed uncommon uses page. Could be a cool little newfilter somebody wrote, could be a blog somebody assembled from feeds, could be a cool little web-based aggregator we’ve never heard of, could be blog spam. Whatever it is, we’ve found that publishers love to see these unique uses and references and that it’s very helpful to have something like feedburner that can leverage a broad base of common references to point out the uncommon ones. You can then “whitelist” or “hide” references you already know about (note that your own site will be an uncommon reference, whitelist that one right away), and you’ll never be Alerted to whitelisted domains on your dashboard again.’
Read about the other updates at TechCrunch » New Feedburner Stats and Features
13 Responses to “New Feedburner Stats Will Help Track Content Thieves”
Quick Online Tips
March 1st, 2006 12:38 am
You are right Darren. This is one of the main reasons I do not publish full feeds as some blogs just republish your full feeds as thier own content. This will discourage them. But what if they pick up the full original source feed of your feedburner feed?
JLP at AllThingsFinancial
March 1st, 2006 6:51 am
“But what if they pick up the full original source feed of your feedburner feed?”
I’m sure that’s possible but I think it would be hard to do since the feed is numbered. I wouldn’t worry about that.
What I don’t like about the “new” Feedburner is the fact that I’m losing the ability to track individual post popularity unless I spend $60 per year to upgrade my account. They are essentially forcing bloggers to fork over the cash. I wish I could charge for my content.
JLP at AllThingsFinancial
March 1st, 2006 6:54 am
LOL! Someone from Feedburner just imformed me that it is a bug or glitch in the program. I have posted about it on my blog.
JLP at AllThingsFinancial
March 1st, 2006 6:55 am
Geez! I just realized that my link it to my old blog. I fixed it now. Sorry about that.
John Zeratsky
March 1st, 2006 10:23 am
Hi everyone — we just put the “missing stats” into production a few minutes ago. You should be able to see everything you could see before the update, plus more.
Thanks for pointing this out. It was an oversight on our part, and we’re glad for folks like you who keep us on our toes :-)
Drop us a line or stop by our forums if you have additional questions.
» New Feedburner stats to combat spam blogs The Blog Herald: more blog news more often
March 1st, 2006 11:59 am
[…] Darren at Problogger puts it this way: “This is a killer app as far as I’m concerned and if it works will remove my main barrier to publishing full feeds on my blog.” […]
Tammy Lenski
March 1st, 2006 1:04 pm
Darren, FeedBurner’s new stats helped me find a content thief today–as far as I’m concerned, I’m in Feedburner’s debt. A marketing firm that tries to sell its services to mediators like myself had republished my full feed–to the tune of dozens of articles–without my permission and without attribution, with AdSense running on their site. Scumbags. I’ve alerted all the other mediators whose material they had “borrowed.”
Kevin
March 1st, 2006 1:09 pm
Do you think using http://www.esbn.org/esbn/default.asp would help in marking your content as your own?
laughingmachine
March 1st, 2006 3:57 pm
Thats Sounds Good
tom sherman
March 2nd, 2006 4:56 pm
Something else that some bloggers do is “sign” all their entries at the bottom (or just their RSS) — i.e. “This was originally posted by Tom Sherman at http://underscorebleach.net” …
Plagiarism Today » Feedburner Fights Splogging and Scraping
March 3rd, 2006 8:13 am
[…] This goes a long way in the battle against splogging and scraping as, for the first time, bloggers don’t have to rely on search engines or dumb luck to find people reusing their content. Instead, they get a neat report of all suspicious activity, complete with links to follow up on. For the moment at least, the guesswork is gone. […]
Mashable*
March 3rd, 2006 10:17 am
Feedburner, aka The Splog Slayer
As a quick followup to my last post about ESBN and splog prevention, you probably noticed that Feedburner rolled out some new features on Tuesday. The best one? The ability to check for “uncommon uses” - this could allow you to track w…
Mashable* » Feedburner, aka The Splog Slayer
March 3rd, 2006 10:20 am
[…] As a quick followup to my last post about ESBN and splog prevention, you probably noticed that Feedburner rolled out some new features on Tuesday. The best one? The ability to check for “uncommon uses” - this can tell you whether sploggers are reprinting your feed without your permission. Darren Rowse and Plagiarism Today are both justifiably pleased with this, but I really wish it was accessible to all bloggers, not just people using the Feedburner service.* […]
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