I have a popular wordpress.com blog, and my feed readers are split between the wordpress.com feed (http://engtech.wordpress.com/feed or http://internetducttape.com/feed) and the FeedBurner feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/engtech). Wordpress.com doesn’t let me redirect to my feedburner feed.

About 624 of my readers are in FeedBurner, there’s another 400-700 who grab the feed directly.

Here are screenshots of my stats from wordpress.com and from FeedBurner. As you can see, there are serious discrepancies. I trust the FeedBurner stats much more.

http://i115.photobucket.com/albums/n296/engtechwp/special/feedburner.png
http://i115.photobucket.com/albums/n296/engtechwp/special/wordpresscom-feeds.png
http://i115.photobucket.com/albums/n296/engtechwp/special/post-freq.png

To make it worse, the wordpress.com stats seem to be pretty dumb in that they count feed reader hits even if it’s just someone clicking on your link from another feed. Not an issue for this experiment, but something to note.

Bottom line: no conclusions can be drawn from using wordpress.com feed stats. Set up a blog somewhere that let’s you use FeedBurner stats and you’ll have a *much* better data sample.

Interesting idea, but the data you’re basing it off of is so questionable to start with.

I have a popular wordpress.com blog, and my feed readers are split between the wordpress.com feed (http://engtech.wordpress.com/feed or http://internetducttape.com/feed) and the FeedBurner feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/engtech). Wordpress.com doesn’t let me redirect to my feedburner feed.

About 624 of my readers are in FeedBurner, there’s another 400-700 who grab the feed directly.

Here are screenshots of my stats from wordpress.com and from FeedBurner. As you can see, there are serious discrepancies. I trust the FeedBurner stats much more.

http://i115.photobucket.com/albums/n296/engtech...
http://i115.photobucket.com/albums/n296/engtech...
http://i115.photobucket.com/albums/n296/engtech...

To make it worse, the wordpress.com stats seem to be pretty dumb in that they count feed reader hits even if it’s just someone clicking on your link from another feed. Not an issue for this experiment, but something to note.

Bottom line: no conclusions can be drawn from using wordpress.com feed stats. Set up a blog somewhere that let’s you use FeedBurner stats and you’ll have a *much* better data sample.

Interesting idea, but the data you’re basing it off of is so questionable to start with.

I’d heard of that but had not seen an actual case of it taking place. Sure I’ve gotten the spam with the text in it, but I’ve never seen my own work used in that way.

Sadly though, you may be very right. If that’s the case, the odds of me finding this text is slim to absolutely none.

I’d heard of that but had not seen an actual case of it taking place. Sure I’ve gotten the spam with the text in it, but I’ve never seen my own work used in that way.

Sadly though, you may be very right. If that’s the case, the odds of me finding this text is slim to absolutely none.

Not all scraping is done for splogs. I’ve gotten (and I’m sure everyone else has gotten) spam emails that have scraped sentences from random websites in order not to be filtered out as gibberish by Bayesian filters. (A particularly amusing one I got reconstituted the descriptions of birds from the Audubon Society).

Not all scraping is done for splogs. I’ve gotten (and I’m sure everyone else has gotten) spam emails that have scraped sentences from random websites in order not to be filtered out as gibberish by Bayesian filters. (A particularly amusing one I got reconstituted the descriptions of birds from the Audubon Society).

As I said in the article, I’m not sure. There are two things that do disturb me, the first is that Wordpress could not identify most of the feed readers. I would thing that it would recognize one from an obvious source such as Weblogs.

Second, those it DID identify were listed as “Web Browsers” and there should not have been any human subscribers to the feed (I didn’t even subscribe). Many scrapers hide their bots by having them identify themselves as Web browsers, it is a well-known trick.

I would say that about 80% of the subscribers were listed as “unknown” and the rest were Web Browsers. I wish I had taken a screenshot of that as well but I was in a rush due to the move. I might reignite the experiment later today and see what happens.

WillMacc,

Thanks for providing further confirmation to my theory. If you have any statistics on that, I would love to see them, perhaps we should work together and form a more thorough study? This was just quick and dirty to get a feel for the problem.

Obviously more research needs to be done as the problem is greater than even I imagined…

As I said in the article, I’m not sure. There are two things that do disturb me, the first is that Wordpress could not identify most of the feed readers. I would thing that it would recognize one from an obvious source such as Weblogs.

Second, those it DID identify were listed as “Web Browsers” and there should not have been any human subscribers to the feed (I didn’t even subscribe). Many scrapers hide their bots by having them identify themselves as Web browsers, it is a well-known trick.

I would say that about 80% of the subscribers were listed as “unknown” and the rest were Web Browsers. I wish I had taken a screenshot of that as well but I was in a rush due to the move. I might reignite the experiment later today and see what happens.

WillMacc,

Thanks for providing further confirmation to my theory. If you have any statistics on that, I would love to see them, perhaps we should work together and form a more thorough study? This was just quick and dirty to get a feel for the problem.

Obviously more research needs to be done as the problem is greater than even I imagined…

Thanks,
WillMacc