A benign nag message from Google to transfer all of LSNC’s feeds from my FeedBurner account to my Google account prompted me to do two things today: complete that painless transfer and reflect on what LSNC is doing with feeds these days.

It was two years ago that I postured here about why we use FeedBurner. For the most part, the substance of what I observed there is still true, although predictably the numbers cited have changed. According to FeedBurner, the LSNC Advocate Feed averages about 30 feed pulls a day, about double what was occuring two years ago, even though Google Analytics tells me that overall site traffic is down significantly from past historic heights. (Webdogs 2.0 gets almost exactly the same amount of feed pulls, even though posts here are not remotely as regular as they are at the LSNC site.)

The biggest piece of the drop in LSNC main site traffic is attributable to our moving the California Food Stamp Guide, which had resided on the LSNC site for the prior five years, to its own domain. (For what it’s worth, traffic at the Food Stamp Guide is still growing incrementally but seems to be topping out at about 54,000 visitor sessions/570,000 page views a year.) But other pieces affecting LSNC site traffic is the systematic removal of site file flotsam as part of The Findability Project (TFP), and the decision to remove specific advocate content that was valued back in the day but is too out-of-date to be reliable. For example, we recently canned a several-years old CalWORKs/TANF guide (built on MediaWiki, which we have dropped as a publishing platform) because we simply don’t have the resources to keep it current. We’re trying to do our best to be responsible to the advocates who use our site.

For a legal services field program, LSNC generates an enormous amount of public web content. For example, during the month of December 2008 alone, the ten staff who post at LSNC’s seven public feeds posted 68 items. No one’s complaining.

But do legal services advocates use feeds? Not really. Some do, but it is telling that Webdogs — a particularly niche site for documenting various tech projects I and others at LSNC work on — gets as many or more feed pulls as LSNC’s various advocate content sites that get mucho thousands of site visitors every month. Geeks use feeds. Normals do not, for the most part.

This conclusion is reinforced by what we see in our FeedBurner account. About 200 people (OK, to be exact, 199 people) currently subscribe to FeedBurner-generated email subscriptions to receive our Cases and Regs updates via email. Even though we have offered full-text feeds for both since inception, as far as we can tell, less than 10 people use a feed reader regularly to pull that same content.

That’s a perspective on how advocates likely use email subscriptions, as opposed to direct feeds, to get web content. At the same time, I recognize that even my own habits have shifted on this. Over time, I have changed my own behavior because of how I rely on these two different ways of getting new information. Two years ago I was feed reader crazy, tracking something like 250 feeds using FeedDemon. Now, I have a better handle on what I want to follow, and now use the much improved Google Reader to track about 80 feeds — and, hey, 20 of those are Google-related blogs! Even those 80 feeds followed are what I consider information “step children.” Because of the central role Gmail plays in my daily work style, I now use email subscriptions as my preferred method for getting select fresh web content that I want to be sure to see, so I make sure it hits my Inbox. (My current fave for doing this is Feed My Inbox.) I go to Google Reader to follow other feeds when I have time, which is to say not daily. But when I absolutely, positively gotta get it delivered to my eyeballs, I use an email subscription.

That’s my reality. Your mileage may differ.

In case you hadn’t noticed or simply would want to know . . . with the acquisition of FeedBurner by Google there is now a small print disclaimer that displays when you login to your FeedBurner account. And I quote:

NOTE: Service of FeedBurner publisher accounts will not be interrupted as a result of the acquisition by Google. You will have a 14-day interim period ending June 15, 2007 to opt-out of allowing Google to service your account. If you take no action by June 15, 2007, the rights to your data will transfer from FeedBurner to Google. Opting out will terminate your user agreement with FeedBurner, permanently delete your FeedBurner account, feeds, and all related statistical data and history, and prevent the transfer of your data rights to Google. To opt-out, contact us via [accountx AT feedburner DOT com], provide your FeedBurner account Username, and request to have your FeedBurner account deleted. We will contact you at your registered email address to confirm your deletion request before completing it.

As lawyers say in legal memoranda, “emphasis in the original.”

It is now official: Google has acquired FeedBurner. Whew, are we happy now that we have wallowed so purposefully all these many months into using FeedBurner for tracking all the LSNC feed content, while also working our way deeper into Google Analytics. Major FeedBurner synergy here, people.

When a feed subscriber stat is reported back for your site by FeedBurner, what does it really mean? Well, the FeedBurner folks earn props this week with a helpful, detailed post explaining how to better interpret the feed stats they provide: FeedBurner’s View of the Feed Market. As the article explains, it’s all about engagement.

If you look at the web feed URI at any LSNC website, you’ll see that we run all our feeds through FeedBurner. For example, Webdogs 2.0 itself gives you a full-text feed via http://feeds.feedburner.com/webdogs. Nominally the great virtue of FeedBurner is that, among other things, it’s a free way to get basic stats on feed traffic, something that as yet you cannot track with, say, Google Analytics, although no doubt Google has plans to throw feed analytics into the mix.

But at this stage of things within the legal services community, does this sort of tracking of RSS and Atom feeds even matter? The answer to that largely depends on who your web audience is.

Here’s an object lesson to illustrate the point: The LSNC.net home page LSNC Advocate Feed has provided a full-text feed (initially using Blogger but now reying on WordPress) since September 2003. That same home page currently averages somewhere between 4,000 to 5,000 page views per week. But after more than three years of full-on feed service to the legal services community, the LSNC Advocate “feed” averages, in a good week, maybe 100 feed pulls. Let me do the math for you: At best, maybe 2.50% of its readers get the job done using a feed reader.

So, what’s the point of tracking this kind of feed data? Hell, what’s the point of having the feed at all? Well, there are several good reasons to have feeds, and to use FeedBurner to do it. Let me explain.

First, there is the “audience” thing. In contrast to the LSNC Advocate Feed, the two-month old puppy you know as Webdogs 2.0 gets more than half the feed traffic LSNC.net gets, i.e., about 60 folks per week pull the Webdogs feed chain to rattle its cage. This is against an average of about 200 page views a week. No big shakes, but even you can do the math on this one: The tech-oriented audience that reads Webdogs 2.0 relies significantly if not predominately on feed readers to access its content.

Second, the free FeedBurner package offers a helpful tool called SmartFeed, namely, it “translates your feed on-the-fly into a format (RSS or Atom) compatible with your visitors’ feed reader application.” Granted, most current feed readers with any serious web cred should handle your feed with aplomb, but it’s nice knowing you’ve got your feed butt covered, right?

Third — and, truth be told, this is the real reason we use it — FeedBurner offers a totally free email newsletter service to complement your feed. What it means is that you can provide your readers with the option to get their feed updates via email. And this is exactly what we do with the fresh content published at our Cases @ LSNC.net and Regs @ LSNC.net sites. For example, you want to read our case summaries in your feed reader? We give you all the feed you need. Not ready for the feed thing yet? Subscribe to the email version at your discretion. And here’s an example of what you get (shown in Gmail):

But there’s more that comes with this enormously useful side of the deal with FeedBurner. You don’t need to do anything other than post your content. Each day, FeedBurner automatically formats and sends out the emails for you. How good is that? It’s this good: Say LSNC welfare guru Jodie Berger, as she does in the normal course, posts a couple of new Regs summaries using Live Writer. Her new content appears immediately at the blog site. Without her or anyone else doing anything more, at the end of the day FeedBurner sends out the same updated content to all the email subscribers. That’s how good it is. And it’s all free.

Even if underutilized, web feeds are now unquestionably a core publication technology. Why do non-geek legal services folks not use feeds more? Some argue that most folks don’t want to change how they do things, and they already get enough — perhaps too much — via email. That may be a partial answer, but I also think we are approaching a tipping point where potential feed users will buy in because the web applications they are already using will soon offer dramatically improved and usable RSS feed features. The relative ease with which web-based tools like the much improved Google Reader can now be integrated into Gmail is only further evidence of that.

Simply put, there will be real reasons for them to use and rely on feeds. And, as a practical matter, once users get familiar and comfortable with using feed features in Firefox or IE or Gmail or Yahoo or whatever — then that will become the preferred way to get fresh newsletter content delivered directly to their “inbox,” whatever form that takes. Then LSNC can drop the whole FeedBurner “email” subscription thing altogether. And then maybe we’ll have use for FeedBurner’s core product: Real feed numbers that tell us something about our readers.