You can change Indy URLs to anything if you leave the unique ID number in. Google's started to index the fake ones people are circulating on Twitter ...

There have been a couple of articles recently (see below) proclaiming the slow death of RSS as a way for users to subscribe to websites. So how do the number of subscribers to newspaper RSS feeds compare?

Here's a table that compares the number of subscribers in Google Reader to each paper's most popular RSS feed 18 months ago and today.

Google's launched a new feature that analyzes reading level scores for websites. Here are the scores for national UK newspapers, plus the overall verdict Google gives on the site's reading level.
There's no right score - ...

Depending on your point of view, Girish Gupta is an idiot or is standing up for workers' rights. Girish is the journalist who did two weeks' work experience at the Independent - and then invoiced ...

UK national newspaper Twitter accounts are continuing to grow - but the rate is getting slower and slower, according to the latest figures for the 129 accounts I'm tracking. November to December growth was just 6.6%, down from 17% earlier in the year.

Newspaper Twitter accounts are continuing to grow - but at an ever slower rate, according to the latest figures for the 130 accounts I'm tracking. October to November growth was just 8.3%.

June 2009 saw the Mail Online unexpectedly overtake both the Guardian and Telegraph in the ABCes, partly on the back of US traffic and Michael Jackson stories.

Fast forward to September and the story is the same as earlier in the year - Guardian first, Telegraph second and Mail third. So what's changed? To find out, I've compared the ABCe figures for UK and foreign visitors in June and in September. The difference between the Guardian's performance and that of the Telegraph and Mail is revealing.

National UK newspapers had 1,665,202 followers of their Twitter accounts at the start of October - an increase of 193,266 on September 1st (when they had 1,471,936).

The rate of growth has slowed, however. This is a monthly increase of 13.1%, compared with 17% from August 1 to September 1, and also from July 1 to August 1.

I posted yesterday about the shameful reporting of the tragic death of a girl who died on the same day as getting the cervical cancer vaccine - and how, without any evidence of a link, the papers were giving the impression that the vaccine, which will save hundreds of lives a year, is unsafe.

So, how are the papers covering the news that, as the BBC news site puts it in its 3rd most important story "Cancer jab 'unlikely' death cause: A girl who died shortly after being given a cervical cancer vaccine had a 'serious underlying medical condition', an NHS Trust says"?

The UK media have learned nothing from the debacle over the MMR vaccine - where they relentlessly covered stories doubting the safety of MMR, putting the lives of children at risk.
They are continuing their habit ...

National UK newspaper accounts had 1,471,936 followers at the start of September, an increase of 213,892 or 17% on August 1 (when they had 1,258,044 followers).

You can see the September figures in the table.

The Guardian has more bookmarks on Delicious than any other UK newspaper according to Quarkbase. There are nearly 11,000 bookmarks for the Guardian, with the Times in 2nd (3,944) and the Independent 3rd (3,196).

The Independent newspaper website is taking a unique approach, and allowing spammers to leave keyword-rich links to spam sites - with no nofollow on them.

There are more than 100,000 citations on Wikipedia that reference the Guardian - more than twice as much as any other UK national newspaper. The FT is way down the list - barely higher than the Sun.

Visitors to UK newspaper sites look at an average of 2.5 pages a day, according to data from Alexa. And 62.8% of users look at just one page. Only the Sun (4 pages/day per user), Guardian (3.1) and Telegraph (2.9) come out above average in terms of daily page views per user.

Overall, Google drives the most US traffic to the nine UK national newspaper sites - 19.1%. News aggregator Drudgereport.com is the 2nd highest source of US traffic. Next is Yahoo at 5.2%, with Facebook 4th at 1.6%.

On average, US traffic to UK newspaper sites is 36.8% of the UK traffic. The figure for the Telegraph is slightly higher (44.5%) and for the Mail it's a massive 62.5%.

By making use of ABCe data, we can check what Alexa says with the official audited data for UK newspapers. As the table shows, it's OK but not brilliant.

Other people have tweeted (or retweeted) the Guardian's URLs 328,288 times over the last 4 months - way more than any other UK newspaper.

The FT and Times have more followers on Twitter than the Telegraph and Mail - but they're not tweeted about as often. The Telegraph is in second place: 120,731 tweets have included a link to one if its URLs. The Daily Mail is 3rd with 95,851.

National newspapers have a total of 1,068,898 followers across all their Twitter accounts - with the Guardian, Times and FT the only three papers in the top 10 newspaper accounts. The Guardian's the clear Twitter winner, as it's place on the Twitter Suggested User List means that its GuardianTech account has 831,935 followers - 78% of the total ...