A message on behalf of the BoingBoing team, from our business manager John Battelle:
We've noticed that our RSS feed stats, provider by Feedburner, have been fluctuating quite a bit lately. We've heard two reasons for this – one,
Yahoo's reporting to FeedBurner has been down, and MyYahooRSS makes up a large percentage of our RSS readership. But a second source of Boing Boing RSS readers has skyrocketed lately – from a company called Pageflakes. We frankly don't believe that nearly two million folks have decided to subscribe to Boing Boing via this relatively new service, and we suspect someone (or more specifically, somebot) is taking advantage of the service for some kind of spammy reasons. We're looking into it with the folks at FeedBurner and PageFlakes, and will report back once we know more.
Update: BB reader Casimir Couvillion says,
I have a clue as to why Pageflakes may be over representing in Boing Boing logs.
I used Pageflakes for a short time a while back. Pageflakes had an annoying bug that would replicate the Boing Boing RSS "flake" many times over between visits, if the duplicates were deleted, they would reappear at the next visit. I just checked and there are 84 copies on my page alone. I don't know why Boing Boing was susceptible to this bug while other feeds weren't. I never submitted it to them as a bug and it was about that time that Google started supporting multiple pages on their personalized home page and I stopped using Pageflakes altogether.
