Feedburner API, Awareness, and Bandwagon Effects
The folks at Feedburner announced an "awareness" API yesterday, with which there are plenty of interesting things you can do.
As a general note, it is worthwhile thinking about why people want others to know a little about their subscriber list. There is, in a strong sense, a bandwagon effect with blogs, one where people don't want to subscribe to yours unless they get a sense that others are subscribing (and that number is growing). Similarly, people don't want to post unless other people are posting -- why waste your best stuff somewhere that people don't read?
On the other hand, you don't want people to know that you have few subscribers. Why make people feel worse for wasting time at your site? Those people, in other words, aren't likely to publicize their subscriber data. At the other end of the continuum, Instapundit and the like aren't all that worried about promoting their numbers to general readers either. After all, it's obvious by media mentions and comment numbers that they have boffo readers.
So, like many things, it is the messy middle where awareness data matters. People will want to disclose enough information to tip people into feeling confident that they're not wasting their time reading your site, but not so much data, say, that you realize the subscriber number is never growing.
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