When I started blogging and looked at my site statistics for the first time, I didn’t know what to believe.

570 hits today and I only started blogging two weeks ago! That’s amazing! What’s causing all this traffic?

Of course this was only feedreaders, search engines and bots probing my blog, so I came to my senses pretty fast. But this got me thinking; my statistics will be crap if I can’t differentiate between computers and carbon based life forms, and what about my feed readers? Is it possible to capture how many are subscribing to my feeds?

It turns out there is. This is where FeedBurner comes in. They provide you with an approximate number of subscribers to your feed. In order for this to work you need to create an account at www.feedburner.com and redirect your feed(s) to FeedBurner. Here’s what FeedBurner say about their service:

Generally speaking, FeedBurner calculates subscribers by matching IP address and feed reader combinations, and then using our detailed understanding of the polling behavior of a multitude of readers, aggregators, browsers and bots on the market to make additional inferences.

For more information about “How do they do it?”, check this out.

There are a lot of variations, but the interesting about this chart is the trend. So for now I probably have somewhere between 20 and 25 subscribers.

And as an experiment to see if these numbers are reliable, I've added a poll where you can tell me if you subscribe to my feed or not :) (PS! It's a Flash thing, so you're unable to vote from your rss reader, you need to visit my site.)