Feedburner Awareness API

Posted by DK

May 1, 2008

Having fun with FeedBurner Awareness API.

The FeedBurner Awareness API (AwAPI) allows publishers of FeedBurner feeds to reuse the detailed traffic statistics we capture for any of their feeds. Third-party applications and web services that consume feeds can leverage this data to provide useful feed awareness statistics to potential subscribers… – awarenessapi

In October 07, BlogSecurity released an article titled, "Feedburner: Show me the money". Knowing your way around Feedburner can be really useful when looking for blog partners or blogs to place ads. Awareness API makes this a peice of cake!

What I also find interesting, is that these statistics could be used by attackers during the target profiling stage to find and sort high traffic sites with accuracy. In addition to this, a more subtle attacker may only want to deface or propogate an attack further by infecting a specific page. How would the attacker easily determine the page with the most traffic?

Enough chit-chat, lets see Awareness API in action by viewing Problogger’s stats:

http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=
ProbloggerHelpingBloggersEarnMoney&dates=2008-01-01,2008-04-02


<feed id="40080" uri="ProbloggerHelpingBloggersEarnMoney">
<entry date="2008-01-01" circulation="36533" hits="61608"
downloads="1" reach="4918"/>
<entry date="2008-01-02" circulation="37465" hits="73923"
downloads="5" reach="6356"/>
<entry date="2008-01-03" circulation="37161" hits="73702"
downloads="1" reach="6525"/>
<entry date="2008-01-04" circulation="36983" hits="71214"
downloads="0" reach="5976"/>
<entry date="2008-01-05" circulation="36559" hits="60201"
downloads="0" reach="4338"/>
...

The boy is definately getting hits!

Specific posts can also be queried (although this didn’t work when I was playing the second time round):

http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=
ProbloggerHelpingBloggersEarnMoney&itemurl=
http://www.problogger.net/archives/2008/05/01/
what-you-say-is-what-you-are-the-problem-of-blogger-inferiority-complex/

<entry date="2008-04-30" circulation="47441" hits="87226"
downloads="0" reach="7632"/>

We found that Feedburner enables this service when the feedCount service is enabled. The Awareness API service does not need to be activated for your site to be displaying this information. We had mixed results when testing. If this is the case, I think this is a bad configuration on Feedburner’s part.

Check out the Awareness API documentation for more uses.

Reflections