For any blogger, your first chicklet was probably your RSS subscriber stats via FeedBurner. For some, this chicklet marked the beginning of a long journey ahead. It was a sign that your blog was prospering and someone out there was listening. Now, your prosperity and popularity doesn't have to be limited to just your blog. Here are a few chicklets from popular sites and services to show off on your blog.
Our beloved Twitter now has a chicklet for users to display the number of followers on their blog using TwitterCounter. TwitterCounter displays your stats just like FeedBurner and allows you to see your growth (or loss) over the a period of time.
Plurk, the underdog that no one's quite sure about yet, also has a follower counter. However, those who are using Plurk and sport hard earned high karma stats can now wave that work around too with a Plurk karma counter that comes in 3 flavors.
Google Reader is one of the most popular feed readers out there. One of the best features of Google Reader happens to be the "Shared Items" feature. Sites like ReadBurner and RSSmeme aggregate these shared items and from the looks of these sites, there's a ton of sharing going on. ReadBurner offers chicklets for just about every page on the site. Keep up with the number of items shared for an author, source, or a user. Just head to any of the aforementioned pages and you'll see a chicklet ready for the taking in the top right corner.
There you have it. These are three of the most popular chicklets out next to the FeedBurner chicklet, which we already sport here on ReadWriteWeb. The point of showing them off is not only for narcissistic purposes, but in a way, they can help to make your authority known. You can share your growth with your community and they in turn will be just as happy as you to help your numbers to grow. So we'd like to ask you, what chicklets are you showing off on your blog
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Thanks for the mention, and followers and activity is a great piece to put on your personal site or blog. It shows how active you really are!
We're working on quite a few things in this same area right now and would love to hear any feedback and suggestions on what you'd like to see on ReadBurner.
The Twitter follower count is an interesting one because everyone said they lost a bunch of followers the other day...seemingly because Twitter cleaned out some spammers.
Posted by: drew olanoff | June 14, 2008 2:27 PM
I'm a bit embarrassed to admit it, because I've been blogging for quite a while, but I really never understood things like feedburner. Indeed, prior to this post I had not even heard the term "chicklet". So I took the chance to review what you're talking about.
Here's what feedburner is: it's a proxy your blogs rss feed that adds some features. In particular they track how many people are "subscribed" to the feed (presumably they use some heuristic based on number of "GET" requests). They also expose the feed to other tools, such as search, and simple web-based methods to read the feed.
In many ways, it reminds me of a simple Google Analytics for feeds. You can't use GA for feeds because there's no JavaScript host at the receiving end to ping google when someone reads an entry. So services like Feedburner have sprung up, and which perform the service for the small cost of introducing complexity into your blog: after all, if Feedburner (or it's competitors goes down), so does your feed. (And I guess that's why the Goog acquired Feedburner!)
There's also the issue of data mobility - Feedburner has the potential to gather a lot of information about how your feed is accessed, but it's not clear who 'owns' that information.
This is all part of the growing pains of the new internet, I suppose. Back in the day this issue never would have come up - if you wanted to know who was reading your stuff you'd check the apache access logs!
Posted by: Josh Rehman | June 14, 2008 3:17 PM
Thanks for the TwitterCounter review. I launched it on thursday and only started coding on it on tuesday and it has gotten a loyal following since then. It can be found on hundreds of blogs and sites already. Honored to see it here too...
Posted by: Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten | June 14, 2008 3:59 PM
perfect theme for a quick post don`t it corvida ;)
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Posted by: mohamed ahmed mohamed ahmed | June 19, 2008 12:00 PM
Thanks for the TwitterCounter review
Posted by: mohamed ahmed mohamed ahmed | June 20, 2008 8:56 AM