Artificial Popularity

Yesterday, I noticed that of the 4 feeds I monitor for myself, 2 of them had jacked up numbers, according to Feedburner.  CTM was fine and so was CTM comments, it was right where it should be but another blog of mine went from a small number to 675 and one that I recently set up for my Tech Arts team at church went from 5 to 79.

Jason Powell noticed his number spike from just under 1000 to just over 1000.  The 2 feeds of mine in question both had jacked up Feedblitz numbers in Feedburner and CTM didn’t include Feedblitz yesterday, which explains it’s normalness.

I checked around at both Feedburner and Feedblitz sites, plus Google and found no indication of a problem.

This morning, I checked things and my other smaller blog is now at 787, another boost in popularity! CTM jumped from it’s comfy 550 average to 662, Tech Arts is back to normal and comments is still untouched.

Again, I checked Feedburner for an explanation – nothing. However, Feedblitz had this to say:

Some readers are reporting a spike in reported subscribers that don’t match the actual count in FeedBlitz. We’re trying to get to the bottom of the issue right now. It isn’t a spam attack or anything unpleasant like that, probably just a previously unknown defect (ok, a bug) somewhere in the code. Updates will follow as and when.

Following that was an update from 10:29pm (EST):

A bug that caused circulation data to get out of sync with the poller has been found and fixed. Metrics for today (Thursday 17th) may well be off, but should be all straightened out from now on. In other words, Friday’s metrics will be what you expect.

Well, apparently the numbers will be straightened out tomorrow but we’ll see.  It’s cool to have a spike in readership, especially when it’s from a big link or something, but this is ridiculous.

Google Analytics stays consistent through all of this, which is good.  I’ll rely on those numbers more than Feedburner‘s, at least for now.

By the way, Jason is tearin’ it up, I checked his number this morning, he’s at nearly 2500!  There is no stoppin’ you, man!