Yet another Feedburner problem

Saturday, October 6, 2007 by Dave Winer.

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.