If they do that would solve the normal user tracking, but for identifying spammers who are stealing your posts it won’t work. They aren’t going to be using the entire feed, just a few posts from it.

Having the image on each post won’t cause a feed reader to access it for every post. Any good reader (or browser) will cache it. From the few reader hits I have had so far that seems to be the case.

With Blogger you have no choice, article footers is the only thing you can modify.

Since index.xml or atom.xml is a single file, surely you only need the one graphical image in the common header section to do the “web bug” style tracking, which then also gets picked up and used by aggregators like Bloglines ?

e.g. in Movable Type’s RSS 2.0 template:

…
<docs>http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss</docs>

<image>
<url>http://www.spy.org.uk/cx72.jpg</url>
<link>http://www.spy.org.uk/spyblog</link>
<width>72</width>
<height>72</height>
<title>>Spy Blog</title>
</image>

<MTEntries lastn=”15″>
…

Then I began wondering about how many RSS readers I had since Blogger gives you no statistics about anything. At first I was just going to do it as a short term test. But then I realized it would be very useful against RSS scrapers since I could just look at my logs to see what sites the image is loaded from.

With Blogger it is really easy. It is found under Settings, Site Feed, then Article Footer. That is also the place where you would insert AdSense for Feeds code which would also give you some tracking data now with Google Analytics, but I don’t want to put ads on my site or feed.