Baaaa. Feedburner.

Alright, that up there is the subscription chart for livingbehindthecurve.com, from the time I fired up feedburner until right about now. That first big jump in June was the result of our first blog carnival, and somehow that’s still the highest-traffic day on record for this site, and the second jump is when I installed the feedsmith plugin, on a lark. My subscriptions didn’t change, but feedburner’s ability to see the subscriptions did, resulting in my numbers more than doubling overnight. I like this little graph. It shows nice, consistent subscriber growth over 4 months.

Right now, I’m performing an experiment for the month of October over there, and thought I should record it over here. As of October 2nd, LBtC has 125 subscribers, which is one off from the all time high, set two days ago. I decided to try posting the feedburner subscription-number widget, to see if it affects the rate of new subscriptions. I’ve always been a little skeptical of the usefulness of these little things:

I’ve suspected for a while now that they’re nothing more than another aspect to the blogosphere pissing contest, and a fad. (You’ll notice there are a lot fewer of them out there now than there were two months ago. Or you won’t, and you’ll take my word for it. Whatever. Better for me.) If there is any advantage to these subscription counters, I hope to see it in that graph at the end of the month, evidenced by a distinct change in the angle of the graph. If the results are inconclusive, I’ll remove it and give it another month and see if the graph shows a difference between September, October and November. And then I’ll talk about my results some more.

Right now, this should be a good time to give it a try. 3-digit subscriber numbers look really impressive, and the site seems to have hit that critical mass that it’s audience is growing organically without a whole lot of constant flogging from the two of us. It’ll be interesting to see what happens.

I predict… absolutely no difference.