Snooping On Your RSS Subscribers

Before you jump to any conclusions, please read the article.

Bloglines has long been one of the most popular RSS subscribers out there. Google Reader gained traction very quick and fast, mostly because they’re Google. Bloglines also shows you how many of its users have subscribed to your feed. For measuring all other RSS feed subscribers you need a feed management tool, like Feedburner. Some Bloglines subscribers leave their list of subscribed feeds open to view to the public. Which is you and me.

I use Netvibes for all my Really Simple Stories, I also have a Bloglines account. I’ve always seen the number of other Bloglines users who subscribe to my feed, but never bothered to go further in and check out some more info. So I snooped around all of the 8 public subscribers, from the 30 I have using Bloglines, and decided to check out what other feeds they were reading.

Ego Boost/

I was surprised to see that some of the subscribers actually had my feed in their “Must Read” or similar types of folders. It was great to see that some readers actually thought of my blog in that way.

/Ego Boost

A Bloglines user can enable or disable if they want their feeds to remain private or public. If you have a Bloglines account, go ahead and check out who subscribes to your blog and where they place you. Of course you can learn other things from viewing public profiles as well, like

• Various reading habits of people
• Ideas for posts on your own blog, and even
• How to make your blog more readable

and hopefully get into the “Must Read” folder for a reader.

Just to be clear I only looked at the various feeds that some of my readers using Bloglines had made public, which was entirely their choice.

Subscribe to my full RSS feed.