RSS & Stats?

[the_kraken]

Good afternoon all,
I am just starting to look at publishing a feed from a clients site into RSS. I have a couple of questions though:

1. Are there ways (if so, what) to track usage on the rss feed? Currently we use NetTracker for our stats.

2. What is the typical impact to bandwidth on a site with an RSS feed? I know my network guys are going to ask about this if I propose adding a feed to our site.

Also, what are everyone's favorite readers? I am using a web-based on for the time being (zfeeder), but am interested in a standalone version.

Thanks for your input.

[toprank]

Feedburner Pro offers the most detailed RSS feed stats I've seen so far.

Firefox + Sage is a great web browser based RSS reader. Otherwise, Bloglines works well as a web based reader.

[encyclo]

Several of the web-based services using your feed give back subscriber numbers within the user agent string - it is a good basic measure of popularity. For example when Bloglines hits, you might see this UA in your stats:

[b]Agent:[/b] Bloglines/3.0-rho (http://www.bloglines.com; 97 subscribers)