As some of you are probably aware, I use Feedburner to manage my RSS and email-based feed subscription services. If you look at the top left corner of my site, you'll see a box showing the number of people subscribed Cool Verification. The number fluctuates from day to day depending on whether people have their feed readers turned on or not. The weekends are usually slow, but I've recently seen subscriber numbers up around 75-80 during the week. This morning, I logged in to Feedburner to check my stats, and low and behold I had 109 subscribers yesterday! That's a jump of 36% - which hasn't happened in a single day since perhaps the first day I started tracking feed subscriptions. A little research through my stats showed the real cause - Google finally started reporting statistics for those subscribed to blogs via Google Reader or Google Personalized Homepage. Google polls my feed each day on behalf of everyone who subscribes through those tools. Previously, that would show up as one subscriber in my feed statistics. Now, each time they poll my feed they provide a count of the number of people who have actually subscribed. For details, check out Google's description. The Feedburner description of the issue is also useful.
What do I use this info for? Knowing how many people subscribe helps me understand whether what I'm writing is being widely read, and knowing which posts people are most interested in helps me know what topics to focus on. For example, I'll be interested to see if anyone is especially interested in my upcoming coverage of DVCon (you are planning on reading my coverage next week, right?).
I do want to thank everyone who reads Cool Verification on a regular basis. Hopefully there are enough good nuggets of info passed on from time to time to make it worth your while. As always, let me know if you've got suggestions for things you'd like to hear about.
