A discussion about corporate and business podcasting with tips and guidelines

But we all know the same ip can hit a rss feed multiple times a day it is not hard to filter out in fact we built our own RSS Stats system for the RawVoice Generator. Its not hard to filter out multiple hits a day and measure how often you see a specific IP..

It's not rocket science.

Todd,

It's much more difficult that you're letting on. I hope you know that or you're going to quickly find that your Raw Voice stats aren't going to be very reflective of reality.

You can't just filter out the same IP. As I said above:

"Then we tried to apply the concept of unique RSS hits, but that not only has the same problems as unique web hits with respect to return listenership, routers are so much more commonplace now that hundreds and perhaps thousands of listeners can be represented by one single corporate IP.

Then we started mucking around with time intervals. If the same IP hits the feed in 10 minutes, it's the same guy. If it's 30 minutes later, we'll count that as a new guy."

Producing meaningful stats for RSS feeds (whether a podcast feed or not) goes well beyond parsing a weblog. The listener's behaviour has to be understood in order to make sense of the raw data.

Of course he leaves out that there is a nice way of using your feed and make a 302 for it and use feedburner in the background.

Todd also likes to leave out the fact that there are ways to use a tool like feedburner with your own domain (against money of course) and that they enable a lot of people to do podcasting who exactly don't want to deal with all this server stuff.

He also likes to blame feedburner of not having accurate numbers, meaning lower numbers than he likes to report them.

As you said, it is not easy being rss stats - start with intervalls of requesting, bots, known non website visitors etc.

And, feedburner does a tremendous job of providing tools and features for the user. One can take it or not - but ESPECIALLY if I am with typepad or any other hosted server - for whatever reason - I would suggest using feedburner so switching to another host is made more easy.