By Brian Beutler
Ezra asked me to post for him while he was en route to California earlier this week and I dutifully failed him. Oops. And now, I'm going to use his copy space, not as a venue for political discourse, but because there's something that's been nagging me that I want the Internets to answer. The question is this: How does a sitemeter or unique-hits counter work when the content is sucked up by an RSS reader? Every five minutes, my reader trolls this and other sites and pulls in fresh content. That can't possibly mean that all of those sites register 12 hits from me every hour, can it? That wouldn't really be accurate.
If I'm right about that, then it's a pretty fair trade-off when NewsFire picks up a sentence-length teaser (like it does at Kevin's) and gives me the option of linking to the full post. But at dear Ezra's site, the entire entry shows up in the reader window in regular text, which means, if my assumption is correct, he doesn't get any sitemeter hits from me even though I read all of his content daily.
So then. What's the answer? How does a sitemeter account for RSS readers, eh guys?
