FeedBurner's “-blogger_feel_good” option
Ah! Check this out.
That is a bug that I am not unhappy with for once: suddenly my FeedBurner FeedCount has grown 900% to a TechCrunch-like subscriber number.
(Gee! Mike is at 62K subscribers now. Sounds like this whole re-design brouhaha did not have much impact after all, did it ?)
So I know it is a wrong number, but many thanks to my FeedBurner friends for introducing this “”-blogger_feel_good“ command line option, or to one of the many RSS readers out therefore for reporting an (obviously outreagously) inflated number 
.
Update: it is now clear from the FeedBurner subscribers statistics page that ”the issue“ is NetVibes, which is reporting 51,328 users reading my feed.
Tags: feedburner, netvibes
Actually, Mike is at 113K due to this glitch. Who said the 53651 didn't matter? :)
Posted by: Pete Cashmore | June 01, 2006 at 05:12 AM
Hi we figured out why you and some others are getting such large subscriber numbers. It looks like one of the aggregators that poll your feed yesterday polled on behalf 50k subscribers when it usually polls for 450. That is one of the ways we calculate subscribers is by adding up the number of subscribers aggregators say they are polling on behalf of.
It is pretty obvious who it is if you look at your Subscribers history at www.feedburner.com for your feed. We are contacting them about the issue and it should be resolved going forward.
I hope that helps explain. Sorry for any inconvenience.
Posted by: Christopher Frye | June 01, 2006 at 06:12 AM
Hey Jeff - we're talking to Netvibes about this - they seem to be temporarily reporting 50866 for all feeds today. I knew Netvibes was doing really well but this surprised me as well!
Seriously, though, i'm sure we'll get it smoothed with them really soon.
Steve
Posted by: Steve Olechowski | June 01, 2006 at 06:15 AM
Thanks Chris and Steve. Looking at my detailed subscriber page, NetVibes shows 51328 people reading Software Only.
Who said that was a bug :-) ?
Posted by: Jeff Clavier | June 01, 2006 at 07:35 AM
I'm glad Pete Cashmore has commented here - he is the man who is showing 5 billion subscribers on his Feedburner button. Way to go, Pete.
Posted by: Ivan Pope | June 01, 2006 at 04:22 PM
sometimes we need crazy numbers to keep our blogging motivation up to speed.
Posted by: colbert | June 12, 2006 at 05:18 AM