Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media

Feed Problems

A number of readers have contacted me to let me know of some problems with the feed for this blog. As a result of posting about some FeedBurner/Google issues, Dick Costolo of FeedBurner has been looking in to things and doing a great job of keeping me informed. As far as I understand it, there are some issues relating to both TypePad's creation of the feed as well as the link between TypePad and FeedBurner. I've been testing the feed on a number of sites in a number of browsers (Bloglines, Google Reader x IE7, Firefox and Safari) and haven't actually noticed any issues (which makes the whole thing that bit more mysterious).

Please sit tight - I'm sure there will be resolution RSN.

Is FeedBurner Dead?

Generally, feed statistics - the account of how many subscribers a blog has - don't jump around too much. Subscribers don't tend to leave en masse. Over the past few days, I've seen the reported numbers from FeedBurner for this blog drop by 60%. This seems like nonsense to me. In addition, I've been getting quite a few emails and comments telling me that the feed is no longer valid, that it contains 'div' elements and so on (this may have been due to my attempt to embed Gigapan images, though I'm not yet convinced of that).

It looks like FeedBurner may be another casualty of Google's acquisition system. Good luck to Jaiku!

I posted recently on the dangers of free systems. Gerald commented that there are lots of free things out there that are great, such as open source software. Open source software is free like someone giving you the blue prints to a car. FeedBurner is free like someone saying: here, I'll give you free fuel for your car. Then, one day you are driving to work and find out that the fuel is actually not gasoline but orange juice. It's still free, but it doesn't work.

So, FeedBurner - what's up? I'd certainly appreciate some information about any radical changes that may have been implemented in terms of how you count things.

10% Feed Click Through

Now that Google has made certain formerly for pay services on FeedBurner free, I can see the click through rate of posts read from the feed - i.e. how many people click through to the blog hosted post from reading the post in a feed reader. It looks like I get about 10%. Is this ball park what others are seeing? Certainly an interesting statistic for advertisers.

BlogLines, NetVibes: Heads Up?

I've been puzzling over a drop in subscribers. Having a look at my FeedBurner stats, I see that the drop seems to be accounted for by a sudden large reduction in subscribers from BlogLines and NetVibes. I appear to have lost these subscribers over night. Is this a real drop in subscribers that is only now trickeling down through the reporting mechanisms that FeedBurner uses? Or is it just a bug?