Scripting News: Yet another Feedburner problem

Scripting News, the weblog started in 1997 that bootstrapped the blogging revolution.

Yet another Feedburner problem

I got an email last week from an Italian blogger who I met at the dinner in Milan in June saying that a feature of Feedburner that allows people to game the subscriber count for a blog is wreaking havoc in Italy. I took a look and found immediately that the conversation is entirely in Italian, a language that I (unfortunately) do not read.

So I asked my Italian host and friend, Paolo Valdemarin, to look into it, and he sent me a detailed email, in English, explaining. I asked him to post the email and he has done so. It's a very interesting situation and calls into question some of the huge Feedburner subscriber counts you see on various blogs.

http://paolo.evectors.it/2007/10/06.html#a3354

The gist of the problem is that it's easy to add 2 million or 20 million subscribers to Feedburner's count for your feed. as Paolo explains.

Thanks Paolo for looking into this. It'll be interesting to see if a discussion develops in the U.S.

Last update: Thursday, June 3, 2010; 4:01:43 PM

~About the Author~

Dave Winer, 55, is a visiting scholar at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in New York City.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.

One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

Mail: scriptingnews1mail at gmail dot com.

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