Today I noticed what looks to be yet another glitch from FeedBurner. There was a serious overnight jump in the number of RSS subscribers on some popular blogs, and I do mean a serious jump. At least that’s what we’re seeing on the feed count chicklets, can’t say for sure if the back end stats are matching this.
It looks like a number of sites increased their RSS feed subscriber count by about 50k people overnight. Techcrunch jumped from 62k to 113k. Emily Chang went from 1k subscribers to 52k. Ehub had around 5k thousand yesterday and is now at 56k. Read/Write Web has gone from 18k to 70k today. CSS Mania is up from 1k to 52k, coincidentally the same as Emily Chang’s. SEW Blog jumped up from 10k to 64k today. 37signals subscriber count has increased from 23k to 78k.
Now, did the mainstream finally figure out what RSS feeds are, or does FeedBurner just have a serious glitch? The again, maybe these are the correct numbers and they just were wrong before. Whatever it is, that’s a nice little gift for these bloggers.
This is making Mashable’s count of 5 billion look a little more realistic.
Update: FeedBurner has responded and the problem is with NetVibes, which is adding 50,866 readers for all feeds.