When did you last check your blog’s subscriber numbers? It’s been quite a while for me. But, this week, I decided to take a quick look at my Feedburner stats. Seems that Sciencetext, SciScoop, and Sciencebase are all doing rather well. In fact, the former two are doing a lot better than expected…

…which was worrying. Visitor rates had not changed much. Traffic has gradually climbed over the last few months and individual posts occasionally get retweeted or bookmarked on various social media sites. However, the leap for Sciencetext specifically since the last time I checked was enormous – a doubling, in fact. Was this simply another example of the Feedburner feedcount myth, yet another example of Google‘s shoddy handling of the system since it took over or something else?

Well, it appears that Feedburner now takes FriendFeed subscribers into account when totting up your subscriber numbers. Now, so Sciencetext, SciScoop, and Sciencebase all seem to benefiting from subscribers who follow me as “sciencebase” on FriendFeed. But, those are all the same subscribers, so if I were to add up the individuals following all three blogs, would I simple have a massively overlapped Venn diagram? I suspect so…rather disheartening, really. I wish I’d never looked.