This document discusses various methods for dynamically broadcasting information via news, RSS feeds, Twitter, email/mailing lists, and online chat. It provides definitions of each method and discusses ways to measure their impact, such as through website statistics, social media engagement, email tracking pixels, and subscriber counts. However, it notes that accurately measuring the reach and impact of email and online chat broadcasts is difficult due to limitations in read receipts, tracking technologies, and user privacy preferences.

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Dynamic Broadcasting
via News, RSS, Twitter and Co.
April 19, 2012 – Carmen Brenner

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Overview
• News and Blog
• RSS feeds
• Twitter
• Email and Mailing lists
• Online Chat

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News and Blog
Definitions:
• Blogs: pages where people present their ideas, views and opinions on
a particular subject
• News: pages where facts or factual information are provided
• BUT: Producing high-quality content for a blog on a regularly basis is a
time-consuming and costly work
– Therefore we decided against a blog for STI International and only maintain a news
page

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News and Blog (contd.)
Measuring your impact:
• Site statistics (Google Analytics and Co.)
– How many visitors?
– How many page views?
– How long where the visits?
– …
• Trackbacks and Comments
– Usually only for blogs
• Social Media Sharing
– Likes, +1s, etc.

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RSS Feeds
Definition:
• “RSS (originally RDF Site Summary, often dubbed Really Simple
Syndication) is a family of web feed formats used to publish
frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news
headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format.” [1]
• XML file including
– full/summarized text and
– metadata such as authorship and publishing date
• RSS readers, feed readers, aggregators
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS

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RSS Feeds (contd.)
How to measure the impact of RSS feeds?
Self-hosted .xml or .rss file
• Web statistics
Third-party RSS feed hosts
• FeedBurner (now owned by Google) [2]
– Subscription data and Reach data (the estimated number of individuals clicking
or viewing your feed content on a given day)
– Breakdown of feed readers and aggregators, email services, web browsers and
bots by which subscribers are accessing your content
– Click-through tracking
– Uncommon uses — sites where your content has been resyndicated including
other blogs, directories and even spam sites
– Item enclosure downloads (podcasts)
– Live hits, conveniently translated to your local time zone
[2] http://feedburner.google.com/

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• Other (third party) solutions:
– Generating unique URLs for each subscriber
– Anonymity vs. exploration of individual user habits
– Such third party services are often only interested in collecting data
– Uniquely named transparent images
– Uniquely named transparent 1x1 graphics can be added to the description field of an RSS feed
– Use standard web logs to see the number of times the image is viewed and determine the number
of times the feed was accessed
RSS Feeds (contd.)

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Twitter
Definition:
• Twitter is an online social networking and micro blogging service where
users can send messages of a maximum length of 140 characters,
follow other users, and create interest lists.
• http://www.twitter.com
Ways to measure impact:
• Followers and Lists
• Re-Tweets RT
• Mentions @
New: Twitter for Businesses offers statistics

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Email and Mailing lists
(Brief) Definitions:
• Email: means of exchanging digital messages from a sender to one or
multiple recipients
• (Electronic) Mailing lists: collection of names and (email) addresses
used to send material to multiple recipients
– Announcement lists (Newsletters, periodicals, advertising) vs. Discussion lists
– Can be self-hosted (e.g. GNU Mailman) or third-party hosted (Google groups, Yahoo!
Groups, …)
Measuring impact:
• Questions:
– Who read my emails?
– How many backlinks were produced?
– etc.

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Email and Mailing lists (contd.)
• BUT: answering this question is difficult!
• Read-receipts:
– MDN - Message Disposition Notifications (inserted into mail header)
– Must be requested prior to sending the email
– BUT:
– Highly depended on email application used (different implementations, or not supported at all)
– Can be turned off by user (and turns the user off  )
• Email tracking:
– Web beacons: embedding of a tiny, invisible tracking image into email
– Only working for HTML emails (not plain-text messages)
– An individual tracking code is referenced when an event occurs
– Message is opened or a link is clicked
– Events are stored in database and used for statistics as click-through rates or open-rates
– BUT: Images and links can be turned off in email applications, spam-filter (!!)

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Online Chat
Definition:
• Real-time communication over the internet
– Text-based chat, video chat, one vs. multiple receivers, web-based etc.
– Endless number of protocols
– ICQ (AIM)
– Jabber
– Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
– Skype
– …
– and endless number of applications
– Google Talk
– Trillian
– Skype
– …
• DISCUSS: Can online chat be used for automated broadcasting?!