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