Browsing through some of my feeds I noticed something quite unusual. Why does every blog post from particular blogs, that use Feedburner Flares in their feed, show the same amount of comments? It’s not limited to just one blog either.

ProBlogger - His older feed comments count either show 17 or 20.

John Chow - His show 10.

CopyBlogger - His show 10 as well.

ShoeMoney - His comments count always show 7.

DailyBlogTips - His always show 5

The screenshots above are all taken from the last feed item in the respective bloggers feed. Clicking over to the specific blog post you can see that the comments are definitely higher than reported. The newer posts tend to show the right amount of comments. Though I’m guessing this also has to do with when the blog was pinged. Certainly it’s not a real time statistic.

Which brings me to my next observation…

If the comment count gets updated regularly for newer posts, Why does it stop counting new comments at exactly the same number? At different numbers too for each of the blogs mentioned above.

So either there is a glitch in Feedburner where it stops pinging at a certain amount for each blog or the above bloggers know something about FeedFlares that I don’t!?

Looking at other popular blog feeds like FreelanceSwitch, Mashable, TechCrunch they do not show this similarity in reporting.

So why the above blogs?

Everyone knows that if you see a high number of comments on a feed item you’re bound to click through to read them. I’ve done so many times, funnily enough they were always the same number of comments as shown above.

About the author

Hyder has been blogging for the past two years on this blog. He started Weborithm, his web company, in 2007 and along with designing blogs and websites also releases various web related products.