How RSS thickened my Long Tail

Alex Barnett blog : How RSS thickened my Long Tail

Media Guerrilla Linkblog — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 20:24:01 GMT

Link: Alex Barnett blog : How RSS thickened my Long Tail. Great analysis from Alex.

re: How RSS thickened my Long Tail

Richard MacManus — Sat, 10 Sep 2005 12:11:14 GMT

Great post Alex!

Charts easier to analyze with log-log axes

Jakob Nielsen — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 20:21:11 GMT

It's quite likely that your pageviews follow a Zipf distribution with classic long tail usage, since most websites have worked this way since at least 1996 (the first time I analyzed such data).

However, it would be easier to evaluate your data if you plotted the data on log-log diagrams (i.e., logarithmic scales for both x and y axes).

See my essay on <a href="http://www.useit.com/alertbox/zipf.html">Zipf Curves and Website Popularity</a> for sample charts.

Basically, if the data shows as a straight line on log-log plots, then you have the expected distribution. If the curve droops on either end, then something else is going on. (See example at the bottom of the above reference with a plot from a site that had 10,000 pages in 1996 and needed 200,000 to fully meet the long tail requirements. By now, I think this site is fully compliant, but I don't have its recent data.)

A second question: what do you mean by "RSS views"? Is this number of times a page was *seen* by an actual human or is it simply the number of times it was downloaded by RSS software? It needs to be user-activated clickthroughs to be comparable with traditional pageviews.

re: How RSS thickened my Long Tail

alexbarn — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 11:00:17 GMT

Thanks Jakob and Richard.

Jakob - I'll study your work on this as you suggest and will try and re-analyze - see what comes up.

Alex.

(btw Jakob - I'll look up the essay and re-run the numbers as you suggest. On your question of the definition of 'RSS views', this is defined by the number of times each item was viewed (NOT how many times the RSS file has been pinged - this is a different number I did not analyse).

You say "Is this number of times a page was *seen* by an actual human or is it simply the number of times it was downloaded by RSS software? It needs to be user-activated clickthroughs to be comparable with traditional pageviews". I respectfully disagree with you on this point - getting RSS clickthroughs would then also count in the PVs log, because the PVs would register each clickthrough as a PV). I'm interested in the number of times each item was viewed - so PVs + RSS views = total views per post/item. RSS-generated clickthroughs, although a good metric to measure, is beside the point of my post).

RSS / Longtail post - update

Alex Barnett blog — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 11:20:55 GMT

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine. who wrote the original The Long Tail&nbsp;acticle,&nbsp;has...

Using Zipf's Law (and Long tail) to forecast website usabilty

James Dutton — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 12:08:19 GMT

Great article - and very interesting.

I know this is slightly off topic, but after reading it I decided that maybe this knowledge could be applied in a web analytics context. So I set out to see if the patterns seen in the long tail model (when using a double log scale) had any bearing on things we already knew about a website.

I tested two sites - one with high customer satisfaction and one with know usability problems. The results were interesting, although maybe not entirely scientific in the approach has got me thinking much more about this.

http://slicecast.com/slices/2005/9/21/using-zipfs-law-to-forecast-website-usability.html

I'm still relatively new to RSS, but am working with Web Analytics vendors to try and figure out best practices for defining clear RSS metrics.

eBay APIs: Innovation without barriers

Alex Barnett blog — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 19:28:48 GMT

Just days after announcing its RSS news, now eBay has confirmed that it is dropping their...

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re: How RSS thickened my Long Tail

Mike Levin — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 20:27:28 GMT

Brilliant article, Alex. Although it's not specifically about using RSS for the purpose, my company built a tool that helps you thicken your long tail. In the sprit of building hits in the tail, it's called <a href="http://www.hittail.com">HitTail</a>. And I like to think of the process as HitTailing.

re: How RSS thickened my Long Tail

alexbarn — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 20:30:45 GMT

thanks Mike. Will check out.

re: How RSS thickened my Long Tail

Mike Levin — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 13:36:27 GMT

Thanks, Alex. It looks like your system here auto-links, and I messed up the link. Anyway, it's http://www.hittail.com I'm putting thought into how to let people similarly visualize their tail.

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