Philonoist.net

I’m late to the whole analytics game (thanks for opening my eyes, Boris), but I’m curious as to who reads my blog. I’m a little sick of the stat spam clogging up my hoster’s stat package, and a combo of Feedburner* and Statcounter should be more than enough crunching to fuel me.

What really interests me is the “Read more…” tag. Now that the recent WordPress upgrade now supports enforces it when you write the tag into your post, I’m sorely tempted to use it to get folks to click-through to my site. Not that I have ads or revenue here, but just to gauge of reader activities. (In other words, StatCounter and FeedBurner are driving my content decisions, and not the other way around. I want to track what you do. No different than anyone else out there.)

I’m not sure readers want to click through, especially those folks using GReader. My own GReader habit tends towards reading posts in GReader (except for Salon and NYTimes, which are of high enough interest to get me to show the original.) I know for a fact that I read xkcd and alwaysBeta substantially more than User Friendly and free Economist.com articles simply because the former are reader friendly and the latter are not. I’ll star and save an interesting looking post that requires a jump for later consumption, but I’m not likely to go and read it. For me, GReading is a strictly in the moment thing: once I close Google Reader, any and all posts I’ve digested go the way of the buffalo.

If I understand correctly, the idea behind the more tag and summaries is to be nice to users: keep the small posts reader-accessible and the longer ones well-summarized and behind a jump. So, for now, I think I’ll keep the “more” tag out of my posts, unless I hear strongly otherwise.

What do you think? Should blogs include “more” tags in their RSS feeds?


PS: You’d be my hero if you read this on the old blogware feed and change to the feedburner one.

Technorati Tags: Google Reader, FeedBurner, StatCounter