Thing 7: RSS Feeds

I posted my feelings about Google Reader, which is a tool to utilize RSS feeds, last time. Any library that is considering creating a blog should make sure that their blog is available as a feed. The downside of pushing your feed out to subscribers is that those subscribers are not checking your library's website each day for news, so how can you tell if anyone's reading your news? How can you tell if your marketing of your blog is effective? You need a way to count subscribers. Here's an article that enumerates the difficulties in counting RSS subscribers, along with a link to a software tool for counting RSS subscribers:

http://www.rss4lib.com/2007/05/counting_rss_subscribers.html

And here's a method using Google Analytics:

http://www.gospelrhys.co.uk/2007/09/how-to-track-new-rss-subscribers-google-analytics-in-3-easy-steps.html