A question came up during this WTF Blog Design Clutter series asking how many feed icons to we need on our blogs. We looked at feed clutter on your blog but how many is too many and which ones do you need?

How many do you think you need?

The two most popular feed types are RSS and Atom. That’s it. How many feed icons do you have on your blog? Hmm?

These are the types of feed, the code that generates the feeds based upon XML formats. From here, there are different types of content that can go into the feed, various off-site alternatives for handling your feeds (called feed subscription services), and many colorful, cluttering feed icons that promote all the different feed readers. read more

According to Joop Dorresteijn over at The Next Web, it’s possible to game Feedburner to artificially inflate the number of subscribers you have, simply by cutting and pasting an OPML file, using NetVibes, and waiting a few hours.

It doesn’t actually increase subscribers (that’s the whole point) but it does inflate the count shown on the chicklet, which could possibly then encourage other visitors to subscribe. read more

As in Adsense for feeds via Feedburner. From the blog post:

We’ve been hinting at this for awhile, but it’s finally time to spill the beans: Starting next week, we’ll be rolling out AdSense for feeds to a small group of publishers, in anticipation of a full launch to all FeedBurner and AdSense publishers “coming soon”. If you start seeing “Ads by Google” on an ad in a feed somewhere, that’d be us.

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Scraping is one of the most annoying things that bloggers have to deal with. It can hurt their search engine ranking, cause confusion among readers and cause them to unwittingly help spammers line their pockets.

Nobody likes being scraped but it seems that some sites are able to survive it relatively unscathed while others are bumped clean out of the search engines, almost instantly replaced by the spammers that take their content.

So how do you ensure that the damage caused by scrapers are kept to an absolute minimum? There is no secret formula, but there are a few tricks that seem to work very well.

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Well, it almost looks like it, as it seems like the numbers are uniformly down, just like 5-6 days ago, when Feedburner’s subscribers had fallen by half.  The reason that was given at the time was that subscribers stats from Google’s Feedfetcher were off line.

Has the same thing happened again?   Many commenters on the same post at Feedburner are wondering the same thing as the numbers seem to be down around 50% again.  More importantly, with these kind of reliability issues the second time in as many days, it does one reflexively wonder what is going on at Feedburner/Google HQ, whether it be security issues, upgrades, or hardware failures or what have you.

Did you notice your Feedburner subscriber stats drop precipitously today? Perhaps a little more than it does on the weekend? Perhaps by as much as one-half?

If you happened to remember that everyone’s subscriber stats *doubled* about a year ago thanks to Feedburner recognizing Google feeds, you might have wondered if the opposite happened — and you would have been right.

Turns out that Feedburner has had difficulty in recognizing the subscribers from Google’s feedfetcher over the past 24 hours or so, and luckily this has been remedied.

So, for everyone who has enjoyed the extra hour of sleep thanks to daylight savings, you may rest assured that your numbers will return back to normal, and all has not been a result of over- (or, perhaps, under-) sleeping.

tip: the very-awake-Ryan Coleman