Earlier this year I had a conversation with Tyme White about twitter and personal branding that had stuck in my head ever since I got off the phone with her. She brought up the fact that I had a lot of twitter followers but where or how would I stay connected with those followers if twitter goes down (fail whale) , twitter gets purchased by google & closed like Pownce or their business model just doesn’t work and everyone leaves the community. We talked about how some people who I admire like Robert Scoble and Gary Vaynerchuck have huge online followers despite twitter. Robert has a large following and readership on his blog before twitter and the same for @GaryVee but we do know they both have used twitter to extend their brand.

Towards the end of his article he disclosed his plan on how to extend his blog. Everyone will take a different approach and should do what makes them feel comfortable. However some thought should be given about how what you do today impacts you tomorrow.

It is easy to build a Twitter audience (Facebook, MySpace…you get the idea). It is much easier than a blog because the tools are there to quickly send friend requests – which most people accept. Send out enough you’ll have people subscribed to your content. However, how many of those people are actually reading or are interested in what you are saying? It is common for people to only read what Twitter displays the moment they log on…they don’t scroll back to see what they missed. Same thing goes for a blog. Just because your FeedBurner stats state you have X subscribers doesn’t mean all of them actually read your content. Just because you have X amount of subscribers to your blog doesn’t mean everyone subscribed actually reads your articles.

That doesn’t mean people shouldn’t use third party services. They can be a great compliment to your site. However, if you have more subscribers to a third party site than you do your own site that might work against you in the long run. If those sites ever went out of business, blocked access to your profile (who often does that happen on Facebook?) or even worse had technical difficulties and lost your friends list what would you do? How screwed would you be?

Another problem is overextending yourself. If you are spread out amongst too many services it makes it very hard for people to follow you – to catch all of your content. Imagine telling your readers go to Facebook for this, MySpace for this, my blog for his, Twitter for that. I had a profile on Pownce but it is gone, update your records. My work record is on LinkedIn, I have Yahoo, AIM, MSN, ICQ and Skype – add me! See what I mean? It’s information overload on one person. Add more people and the odds are they aren’t tuning in as you’d like them to.

With my own audience I don’t put anything in between us. It’s me and them. That’s how we roll. For me, it works out. Sure, we drive each other crazy sometimes but I know they are reading what I say. Not necessarily expressing their honest opinion (we’re working on that) but they are reading and interacting with me. Not via Twitter or anywhere else but my site, my email, my IM…me.

I answered Wayne’s question in the comments section of his article. Head on over if you want to take a peek. Remember – social media sites are tools. Use them wisely.

Honestly, everyone starts of with zero readers so we have all been there. The point remains that sometimes showing those stats can cripple you instead of help you. This isn’t a discussion about whether the tools should be in place to measure traffic. This is about making those statistics public.

Think about this for a minute. There are some sites that start, hit the ground running and accumulate large readerships quickly. This is not the norm. Most take a considerable time investment to grow. It’s a gradual process. When I come across a site that has a FeedBurner badge that shows 10 readers, I see Adsense on the site and there are Digg/Reddit buttons showing most of the articles have no submissions and add to it there is minimal comment activity, what impression do you think you’re making on the reader? Do you realize what you are saying…without actually saying it?

1. You have a very small following.
2. If you’ve been writing for a while and still have no traffic, you suck.
3. You can’t be making much money with advertising if no one is around to view ads.
4. If I advertise on the internet, I’m not going to advertise with you because you don’t have the audience.
5. If you want your blog to be commercial what business logic did you use to justify making those stats public? (Exception – a blog being used as an example on how to build a blog from scratch. Those stats are a measurement tool. Most do not fit in that category.)
6. You’re a follower not a leader. You followed everyone else using the new tools even when the odds are they cripple you more than help you.

Let’s really think about this. If you don’t have much comment activity (makes sense, few readers), do you think the average person is going to take time out of their busy day to write a comment that no one is going to read? Some will, most won’t. You are discouraging people to comment. You are discouraging people to read your site because there are other more qualified sites…you know, the ones that have people reading them. If you really want to be a top player in your niche, it’s time to start thinking better, making wiser decisions, tapping into some leadership qualities – the main one: realizing what you do today can screw you up tomorrow so you best think about what you do today and how it will impact you tomorrow.

If, five months later, your blog proudly shows you gained 10 more readers what does that mean? At that rate by 2025 you’ll be actively competing with the other blogs in your niche, which is the goal right? You’re writing is great, that’s all it takes to have a successful blog, right?

You didn’t really believe that did you?

My point? Using the new cool “thing” isn’t always in your best interest or even better…if you’re going to use the new cool “thing”, use it to your advantage.

Since Mike Arrington came up in the comments of the previous discussion, let’s use Mike as an example. He is considered “big” in the Web 2.0 arena so it is very natural that someone wanting to start a site in this niche would look at his site as an example of perhaps a minimal standard of what is needed on a Web 2.0 site. TechCrunch has links in the top navigation area, content on the left side, and links on the right. Very common set up. Now let’s look at it a bit closer.

Top Navigation: With the exception of the FeedBurner badge showing how many subscribers he has, all the of links point to TechCrunch or one of his other sites.

Content – Easy to follow (with graphics) entries.

Sidebar – Ads and more links. Some links are to his other sites that do not fit on the top navigation bar. There are links for his advertisers which are outbound links. The other outbound links are to his hosting company, the company that optimized his site and a counter that displays how many people are online at a time.

Let’s look at another example – Engadget. By far a dominating site in the technology niche. Their layout is somewhat similar. They do not have top navigation but the content (with graphics) is on the left, links on the right.

The copycat looks at these sites and thinks: Cool, links at the top, content on the left, sidebar with links. They might decide to be creative and put sidebar on the left, content on the right. This is when the copycat makes a mistake trying to be big when he/she is not.

Look at the links.

On both sites the links in the sidebar are advertisers, links to other content in their network (or other sites they own), links on how to subscribe to their site and their partners. Let me be blunt: the only way a different outbound link gets on their site is if they write an entry. They do not have a bunch of outgoing links on their sidebar.

The copycat thinks “links” but doesn’t have a network, doesn’t have advertisers and no real way to fill the sidebar. What do they do instead? Fill it with stuff they DO have – their MySpace, Virb, Facebook, etc. profiles, their Flickr photos, Twitter, bookmarking profiles, etc. They successfully fill up the sidebar. There is just one problem.

There are more outbound links to draw people away from the site than reason to keep them there. Mike has a Twitter profile that he keeps up to date and has a large following. So does Engadget. Do they link to it on their sites? No. Mike will link to things to test it out but they don’t stay long. Why?

Because the “big” site makes people pay to get those outgoing links with the exception of those linked in their entries and they are picky about who they link to. The copycat encourages their readers to leave, the “big” person understand the value in them staying.

If you are one to watch traffic, are you inviting people to leave your site?

There is a problem: what do you do if you want to monetize your site and advertising companies you use rely on third party statistics that are not accurate? Alexa is known for being inaccurate (more to forecast trends than actual stats). What does a blogger/writer do if Alexa is showing inaccurate stats and the advertising company you use relies on Alexa and other third party services? Good question.

Since I use Text Link Ads on this site I decided to ask Patrick Gavin, President of Text Link Ads, how the company deals with issues like this. Seriously, I manage my site and the more information I have the better I can do it.

Tyme: Alexa obviously has accuracy issues – all of them do. Anything with a toolbar can be gamed. Technorati has their issues too. For example, if a site has a high number of inbound links because the blogger requested people to write a review of their site, which many feel is another way of “gaming” the system. Does TLA and Review me have other methods in place to ensure that sites are judged fairly? If so, can you share a little bit about how sites are judged/priced?

Patrick: We agree Alexa is not a perfect solution for gauging a website’s traffic. A perfect example is a blog devoted to Apple users whose user base will be heavy FireFox users not using the Alexa toolbar. Because of this the Alexa ranking for this blog will be disproportionately high compared to say a blog about Microsoft. We understand this so Alexa ranking is not the only criteria we use when pricing our publisher’s websites for our products.

We use a combination of: The website’s theme, location of the ads, number of ads to be sold, Alexa ranking, Technorati rank, and a measure of the website’s link popularity. We have an algorithm that prices our inventory based on these many criteria. The results are never perfect but by taking in six data points it can help even out some of the disparities that happen with Alexa data alone.

Six different data points – that makes me feel better but I can see where more metrics will have to be used to better screen sites initially because those things can be gamed. Getting your site accepted might be a challenge but honestly, it should be. If you’ve already been accepted, how do you make sure your site is getting the best advertising deals?

Text-Link Ads [linkbuildingblog.com no longer active] has a blog with a wealth of information on how to optimize your site and increase traffic. Subscribe to the feed. After going through the blog, do the one thing most people don’t do. Take some responsibility in the monetization of your site and work with the advertising company to get the most out of it. That’s the main point of this entry. Most people slap code on the sidebar and then complain on how it doesn’t perform. Or worse, move the ads around for a month and because there isn’t instant change become frustrated. I see my relationship with TLA like a partnership and I expect them to do their part and I have a responsibility as well. I actually have to manage my site and work with them for optimal success. If you are using a company that you can’t interact with, well…why would you do that?

I had a question, I asked, I received an answer. When I start optimizing this site I will (after looking over the blog) most likely have some more. I know one thing, I’m not going to throw code up blindly and pray it works.

Rick and I will be doing a podcast answering any remaining questions. Keep ‘em coming!

Why isn’t the blog used more to educate people? It seems like it’s mainly used for announcements.

It’s true that we use our blog mainly for announcements that are applicable across FeedBurner’s wide audience. But your point is well taken and there is a lot more we are doing on that front, and will continue to do. Check out recent posts from Dick, me, last fall’s look inside TechCrunch’s numbers, Brent’s bylined articles in Adotas, the hundreds of interviews we’ve done over the past few years with media publications as well as independent publishers, our Publishers Tips site, or last spring’s podcast market overview as a few examples of educational posts. In addition to our own blog, the publisher team (that’s my team) typically leaves 30-50 comments per week on _other_ blogs so that we’re answering questions people ask in near real time. That way, we don’t force people to come to us to get educated about how we work… if they ask, we’ll answer.

I want to know what happened with the Pageflakes thing. How was it resolved? What measures were put in place to stop it from happening again?

This question is referring to a bug where, in certain cases, they were over-reporting the number of Pageflakes subscribers to a given feed. In that case, we contacted Pageflakes, they acknowledged the bug, let us know when it was fixed, and we resumed reporting the Pageflakes data. While we obviously have no control over how web-based aggregators collect and/or report their data, our algorithms are often able to detect anomalies in the data we receive that allows us to proactively reach out to those services to verify the information we’re seeing. When we establish that things are out of whack, we disclose the issue (e.g. this example) and wait until things are resolved before resuming inclusion of their data in the overall reports.

Is it possible to export data and if not will it ever be?

Yes, click “export” from the “Analyze” tab. Data’s available in Excel or CSV format.

What are their privacy policies? The company I work for is starting a blog in Feb. The very first thing they would question is who has access to the stats and what precautions can be made to ensure privacy. I read on a blog that by not checking one thing stats could be pulled through the API.

Our privacy policy is here. By default, your data is private, and no one other than the account holder has access to the data. If you choose to make your data public (which you can do only by explicitly setting the Awareness API service to “public” – it is set to private by default), then anyone who follows the documented API guidelines can retrieve shared data (like circulation, hits, etc.). A good example of how this information can be used well is the podcast directory here. To reiterate, this information is *private* by default, and is only public if you choose to make it so.

I thought FeedBurner had a content network? Can’t find it from the front page.

Since different people mean different things by “content network”, I’m not sure how to answer this. We have FeedBurner networks available to publishers who want to aggregate their content – currently in beta, details are here.

As a blogger am I able to opt out of my site’s data being used for advertising purposes? Data collection?

By default, FeedBurner users are *not* in the ad network, so their data is not used for any advertising purposes. Since the primary reason bloggers use FeedBurner is to collect data about their feeds and sites, I’m not sure how to address a desire to opt out of data collection, so perhaps we need to do some follow-up on this.

How secure is the FeedBurner service for bloggers?

If by secure the questioner is asking about data security, see question/answer above about our privacy policy. We lock our doors at night, and all of our laptops have really secure passwords. If the question pertains to something specific or less sarcastic, let me know and I’ll be happy to address. Beyond that, I’m not sure what to say in terms of security, since the goal of this aspect of the service is to provide publicly available data in the form of RSS feeds.

For commercial use if we decide we do not want to use the service any longer what happens with the data collected from our visitors?

You may export your statistics (via the export feature described above) and delete your account. We do not keep any data once an account is removed from the service. Let me take a minute to address another aspect of leaving FeedBurner that wasn’t asked here but is often asked: specifically, what happens to your subscribers once you choose to leave FeedBurner. They’re your subscribers, we don’t want them after you leave. So we’ve gone to great lengths to ensure that your subscribers will follow you after you decide to leave (visit the link for more details).

Will performance be an issue if my site receives a large spike in traffic like Digg?

One of the many reasons publishers choose to use FeedBurner is to offload all bandwidth relating to their feed traffic to us. We manage more than 500,000 feeds, including thousands of feeds for 7 of the 10 top newspapers in the country, 3/4 of the Technorati 100 most popular blogs, and many thousands of high-traffic feeds. With more than a quarter billion feed requests per day, we maintain a high availability server infrastructure, and MySQL has used us as a case study (see this to show how MySQL can be used to power high demand environments like ours). We consistently keep our server farms at fractions of their total capacity, and our connectivity is structured in a way that were we ever to need to spike well above the hundreds of megabits of sustained connectivity we currently use, we could do so without any impact on overall performance.

Which is a long way of saying, “No.”

Why does the FeedBurner count increase dramatically after I am Dugg, then goes down a couple of days later? Did I lose all those visitors?

This is primarily an artefact of prior versions of Firefox (1.5.x and prior), where requests to the feed are labeled the same whether coming from the browser or the feedreader (LiveBookmarks). As a result, we would have to infer from the traffic patterns (i.e., polling intervals, IP addresses, identical user agents) to determine whether the access to the feed was a one-off (i.e., browser) or a repetitive request (i.e., the feed reader). Because of the high concentration of traffic that a site receives when Dugg, those inferences are often impossible to get 100% correct – so some one-off accesses end up looking like repeated requests, and our algorithms count them as subscribers instead of browser views. Recently, the Mozilla team added a unique user agent for the feed reader in Firefox 2.0 (per FeedBurner’s request), which means that these anomalies should be far fewer from now on.

What do they think needs improvement? Can they talk about future plans? They also seem like they are all over the place. What do they DO? Is it feeds, advertising, what is it?

Wow. Let’s see: what needs improvement? Everything. We want the web audience at large to be more comfortable with the notion of subscribing to media feeds. We want publishers to get more value from their feed content by adding more functionality. We want to see creative developers build more cool stuff using our open APIs. We want to sell more ads, so our publishers can make more money. The radiators in our office are maddeningly spotty, so we never know when to dress warm, so that’d be good to fix while we’re improving things.

As far as futures, we’d like to see the Bears win the Super Bowl. A Cubs/Sox World Series would be totally cool, too. On a more serious note, we’ve recently stated that further integration between our feed and site stats is in the near future, as well as a platform for measuring all aspects of content consumption: in a feed, on a site, in a widget, or via some new thing that doesn’t have a buzzword attached to it. However content is consumed, we’ll measure (and monetize) it. Expect to see a lot from us on this in 2007.

Regarding the ‘all over the place’ comment, our goal is simply this: FeedBurner aims to be the world’s foremost provider of online media distribution and audience engagement services. We want to help content publishers, be they independent bloggers or podcasters, blog networks, or commercial publishers – to distribute their media further, engage and build their audience and ultimately, make money. We think we’re in the best position to understand, measure and enhance the distribution of content – via feeds, resyndication, widgets, and who knows what comes next – and then, for publishers who want to capitalize on that understanding, we offer a monetization platform with our advertising network.

Rick and I will be doing a podcast answering any remaining questions. Keep ‘em coming!

Why isn’t the blog used more to educate people? It seems like it’s mainly used for announcements.

It’s true that we use our blog mainly for announcements that are applicable across FeedBurner’s wide audience. But your point is well taken and there is a lot more we are doing on that front, and will continue to do. Check out recent posts from Dick, me, last fall’s look inside TechCrunch’s numbers, Brent’s bylined articles in Adotas, the hundreds of interviews we’ve done over the past few years with media publications as well as independent publishers, our Publishers Tips site, or last spring’s podcast market overview as a few examples of educational posts. In addition to our own blog, the publisher team (that’s my team) typically leaves 30-50 comments per week on _other_ blogs so that we’re answering questions people ask in near real time. That way, we don’t force people to come to us to get educated about how we work… if they ask, we’ll answer.

I want to know what happened with the Pageflakes thing. How was it resolved? What measures were put in place to stop it from happening again?

This question is referring to a bug where, in certain cases, they were over-reporting the number of Pageflakes subscribers to a given feed. In that case, we contacted Pageflakes, they acknowledged the bug, let us know when it was fixed, and we resumed reporting the Pageflakes data. While we obviously have no control over how web-based aggregators collect and/or report their data, our algorithms are often able to detect anomalies in the data we receive that allows us to proactively reach out to those services to verify the information we’re seeing. When we establish that things are out of whack, we disclose the issue (e.g. this example) and wait until things are resolved before resuming inclusion of their data in the overall reports.

Is it possible to export data and if not will it ever be?

Yes, click “export” from the “Analyze” tab. Data’s available in Excel or CSV format.

What are their privacy policies? The company I work for is starting a blog in Feb. The very first thing they would question is who has access to the stats and what precautions can be made to ensure privacy. I read on a blog that by not checking one thing stats could be pulled through the API.

Our privacy policy is here. By default, your data is private, and no one other than the account holder has access to the data. If you choose to make your data public (which you can do only by explicitly setting the Awareness API service to “public” – it is set to private by default), then anyone who follows the documented API guidelines can retrieve shared data (like circulation, hits, etc.). A good example of how this information can be used well is the podcast directory here. To reiterate, this information is *private* by default, and is only public if you choose to make it so.

I thought FeedBurner had a content network? Can’t find it from the front page.

Since different people mean different things by “content network”, I’m not sure how to answer this. We have FeedBurner networks available to publishers who want to aggregate their content – currently in beta, details are here.

As a blogger am I able to opt out of my site’s data being used for advertising purposes? Data collection?

By default, FeedBurner users are *not* in the ad network, so their data is not used for any advertising purposes. Since the primary reason bloggers use FeedBurner is to collect data about their feeds and sites, I’m not sure how to address a desire to opt out of data collection, so perhaps we need to do some follow-up on this.

How secure is the FeedBurner service for bloggers?

If by secure the questioner is asking about data security, see question/answer above about our privacy policy. We lock our doors at night, and all of our laptops have really secure passwords. If the question pertains to something specific or less sarcastic, let me know and I’ll be happy to address. Beyond that, I’m not sure what to say in terms of security, since the goal of this aspect of the service is to provide publicly available data in the form of RSS feeds.

For commercial use if we decide we do not want to use the service any longer what happens with the data collected from our visitors?

You may export your statistics (via the export feature described above) and delete your account. We do not keep any data once an account is removed from the service. Let me take a minute to address another aspect of leaving FeedBurner that wasn’t asked here but is often asked: specifically, what happens to your subscribers once you choose to leave FeedBurner. They’re your subscribers, we don’t want them after you leave. So we’ve gone to great lengths to ensure that your subscribers will follow you after you decide to leave (visit the link for more details).

Will performance be an issue if my site receives a large spike in traffic like Digg?

One of the many reasons publishers choose to use FeedBurner is to offload all bandwidth relating to their feed traffic to us. We manage more than 500,000 feeds, including thousands of feeds for 7 of the 10 top newspapers in the country, 3/4 of the Technorati 100 most popular blogs, and many thousands of high-traffic feeds. With more than a quarter billion feed requests per day, we maintain a high availability server infrastructure, and MySQL has used us as a case study (see this to show how MySQL can be used to power high demand environments like ours). We consistently keep our server farms at fractions of their total capacity, and our connectivity is structured in a way that were we ever to need to spike well above the hundreds of megabits of sustained connectivity we currently use, we could do so without any impact on overall performance.

Which is a long way of saying, “No.”

Why does the FeedBurner count increase dramatically after I am Dugg, then goes down a couple of days later? Did I lose all those visitors?

This is primarily an artefact of prior versions of Firefox (1.5.x and prior), where requests to the feed are labeled the same whether coming from the browser or the feedreader (LiveBookmarks). As a result, we would have to infer from the traffic patterns (i.e., polling intervals, IP addresses, identical user agents) to determine whether the access to the feed was a one-off (i.e., browser) or a repetitive request (i.e., the feed reader). Because of the high concentration of traffic that a site receives when Dugg, those inferences are often impossible to get 100% correct – so some one-off accesses end up looking like repeated requests, and our algorithms count them as subscribers instead of browser views. Recently, the Mozilla team added a unique user agent for the feed reader in Firefox 2.0 (per FeedBurner’s request), which means that these anomalies should be far fewer from now on.

What do they think needs improvement? Can they talk about future plans? They also seem like they are all over the place. What do they DO? Is it feeds, advertising, what is it?

Wow. Let’s see: what needs improvement? Everything. We want the web audience at large to be more comfortable with the notion of subscribing to media feeds. We want publishers to get more value from their feed content by adding more functionality. We want to see creative developers build more cool stuff using our open APIs. We want to sell more ads, so our publishers can make more money. The radiators in our office are maddeningly spotty, so we never know when to dress warm, so that’d be good to fix while we’re improving things.

As far as futures, we’d like to see the Bears win the Super Bowl. A Cubs/Sox World Series would be totally cool, too. On a more serious note, we’ve recently stated that further integration between our feed and site stats is in the near future, as well as a platform for measuring all aspects of content consumption: in a feed, on a site, in a widget, or via some new thing that doesn’t have a buzzword attached to it. However content is consumed, we’ll measure (and monetize) it. Expect to see a lot from us on this in 2007.

Regarding the ‘all over the place’ comment, our goal is simply this: FeedBurner aims to be the world’s foremost provider of online media distribution and audience engagement services. We want to help content publishers, be they independent bloggers or podcasters, blog networks, or commercial publishers – to distribute their media further, engage and build their audience and ultimately, make money. We think we’re in the best position to understand, measure and enhance the distribution of content – via feeds, resyndication, widgets, and who knows what comes next – and then, for publishers who want to capitalize on that understanding, we offer a monetization platform with our advertising network.

I’ll keep this open for two days then close comments. Thanks!

I know I am going to be asked, “Tyme what would you do?” so here is what I would do if I owned the Mashable site. That doesn’t mean they should do this or are wrong if they don’t. It’s what I would do and perhaps it will help other bloggers.

1. I would realize that unless something is done, Mashable will always be known as the site that tried to take advantage of inflated statistics. People will stop talking about it shortly but no one is about to forget it anytime soon.
2. I would develop an ethics policy I know I could live by daily, and make it public. As a news reporting site I would expect Mashable to call out a social network company that crosses the line ethically. If they call out companies I would expect them to hold themselves to a higher standard to avoid hypocrisy. An ethics policy makes it clear what the stance is on issues and gives readers the ability to hold the site owner accountable. For example, did all these people really vote for Pageflakes? It’s a conflict of interest – they win on the site that happened to be reporting 410K+ subscribers coming from them.
3. I would remove all references to stats regarding pageviews unless I was prepared to back it up. I have issues with sites that throw out large numbers but can’t explain them.
4. I would put the FeedBurner counter back up. The number has been released. Hiding it now is kind of pointless. Be honest about it because everyone knew it was going to drop. 27K is nothing to sneeze at – it’s a damn good number. Be proud of it.
5. No one is believing anything Mashable says right now and that is key to understanding how to solve this problem. The trust and respect has to be earned back. Apologizing across the internet isn’t going to help much because it’s a unbalanced conversation. Everyone that needs to read it won’t see it.
6. Keeping #4 in mind, I would write about it. The discussion would be held on my site. I would apologize and accept responsibility for my mistake. I would share what I learned, point out the ethics policy and the changes I intend to make. I would not under any circumstances try to make excuses or explain it away.

That is a short list of what I would do. It would extend beyond that but I think you get the idea. Words mean nothing at this point, it’s all about action – consistent correct ethical decisions.

Let’s be real – everyone makes mistakes, some larger than others. If you write online long enough you’ll encounter drama. People don’t believe me when I tell them Scrivs has stopped me many times because my words sound extremely cocky sometimes (yeah, I know, it’s hard to believe lol). The people bashing Mashable have all made their own mistakes, learning their own lessons. Mashable will get through this just like all sites do – hopefully a hell of a lot smarter.

It’s good the truth came out

It is good that one site’s numbers were so outlandish it drew attention so the problem can be fixed. Yes, Mashable’s number dropped dramatically but there are sites with less readers who had inflated stats as well. If they only had 60 and dropped to 10 because of this, that’s devastating because they really thought they had 60 – that’s not a far reach. I feel for those people because they didn’t see it coming.

Talk about what’s really going on

Mike Arrington started this conversation by talking about Boing Boing, causing Ole Brandenburg from Pageflakes to respond to the Boing Boing issue, not Mashable. I knew what Mike Arrington was really talking about (I had just heard about it myself about a week before), and decided to write about it, because that’s what I do. Dick Costolo from FeedBurner was nice enough to respond in the comments and he said the issue would be fixed and it was, when he said it would be.

In my original entry, I brought up an issue I had with Mike Arrington. Mike emailed me explaining the situation and we’ve cleared that up. Thanks Mike. I updated the entry to reflect that.

When in trouble, be honest about it. That builds trust.

Dick Costolo (CEO & Co-Founder of FeedBurner) responding to this issue and having the problem fixed when he said it would be boosted my trust in FeedBurner tremendously. My readers know I detested FeedBurner and at one time dumped any site that had a FeedBurner feed so this is me eating crow. This is huge – me saying I like FeedBurner. FeedBurner earned my trust and respect. That is what Mashable is going to have to do in their community. Earn the trust and respect back. It’s going to be hard work but if FeedBurner can do it, Mashable can.

There is no excuse for laziness.

Pageflakes was unforgivably lax on this issue and due to this, unfortunately, it throws the responsibility on FeedBurner to get the numbers right. Conservative numbers are better than inflated ones. FeedBurner is considered a reliable source for stat measurement. IMO it’s more important FeedBurner get the numbers right than catering to Pageflakes or any other company. One thing that is being overlooked in the Mashable bashing is that Pageflakes continued to report ridiculously inflated numbers to FeedBurner for a long time. If Mashable is “bad”, what is Pageflakes?

If a 9rules member is doing something wrong, talk to me

It amazes me that readers realize if a 9rules member is allegedly doing something unethical they can contact me (I am Community Director) and I will get to the bottom of it. Bloggers don”t have this wisdom because I did not receive one email from a blogger – all readers. Seriously, contact me when situations like this comes up.

It’s going to happen again, then what?

So what happens if this happens again, instead of being 410K the numbers are more subtle, like adding 1K a month? Something reasonable but hard to spot? How do we stop this from happening again? That’s what we should be talking about.

Coming up next: what do you do if, as a blogger, you get yourself in a mess like this?

Bloggers/writers do this all the time. I was honest and said the other day I doubted the author was writing about the site mentioned. People following the issue knew exactly what site he was thinking of but that’s not the one that made the front page of the author’s site. I understand completely why this strategy was used but it’s just like the woman not telling the man what she really wants, yet expecting him to get it right. You see the entry (IMO) served a purpose and to resolve the issue, someone had to “get it”, take the ball and run with it. Luckily, the situation should be resolved this week.

Blogging/writing is all about communication. Without proper communication how is the man supposed purchase the right gift? How is an audience supposed to follow a blogger/writer’s logic when the writer is writing about one thing on the surface, but really writing about something else? The core audience understands it and everyone else is left in the dark, splitting the audience. Some “get it”, most don’t. How can an audience stay interested if they are not fulling understanding the articles?

While you ponder on that one, let’s watch Devin’s music video. Hmm, that video won’t make much sense by itself. Oh, you’ll enjoy it but there was a reason why it was made. Why? Because, if I remember correctly, Scrivs and Devin had a dance off, in which Scrivs had his first try at video editing. The Editing King (Devin) was demonstrating to Scrivs that it’s not hard to edit. See! Makes more sense now doesn’t it? Without knowing the story you would have missed two cool dance videos….