dot com parties, search engines and newsfeeds

Yesterday I was at my first dot com party, I think. Search engine people (developers and optimalizers), marketing people, designers, concept developers, interaction experts and consultants, and free beer/wine for everyone.

It was enjoyable to mingle around and talk to these people that thrive on the borders of my own industry (being software programming). But I also got a spooky feeling of déjà vu. Might be a sign of things to come. I do think we have a bubble burst ahead of us, maybe less then three years from now, maybe even this year. It depends on whether we, the industry as a whole, will be able to stabilize our growth in time.

Enough doom's day speculation. Talking to all these bloggers I began thinking about my statistics and news-feed (those of you who are more observant noticed that I outsourced the feed to FeedBurner when I upgraded to the new Blogger. This was mainly for the purpose of quick and easy feed statistics.

However, I've noticed a recent drop in hits/visits. According to my new year's resolution I want to achieve 200 weekly visits by the end of this year. I recently had a short bounce over 100, but after that it has dropped and stabilized around 80.

At the same time I've seen the FeedBurner number of subscribers rise to 26. I don't know how much these subscribers read my blog. I would think FeedBurner can't really tell either since they are continually pinged by various blog aggregators, so no point in measuring hits there.

Update: Found another interesting graph (number of FB subscribers):

A FeedBurner upgrade promises to give me the real numbers. I'm gonna try out the free trial and see what I get. They claim that by loading a small GIF into the blog-post they can track how many views a blog-post gets. If that works it sounds like a pretty accurate measurement of blog traffic. I'll post back with the results in a couple o' weeks.

With TotalStats you can see how many times each item in your feed has been viewed and clicked. Views are tracked by using a 1×1 tracking gif that when opened in a newsreader will render and we'll be able to count a view for you. Clicks are simply clicks on the headline of the item which will bring readers back to your site.
Source: Profy

I like what this guy has done with abstracting away the link to traffic his feeds with some web server configing. Unfortunately, being hosted at Blogger doesn't leave me much control of the .htaccess file.

There is also some critisisim about. What does happen if FeedBurner goes out of business? Will you guys be able to find back to this blog and get a new newsfeed url? I think so :)

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