Feedburner on Chicago

Today’s Wallstrip interview is with Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo. I recently posted about the Feedburner/Google acquisition rumors and how it would be a big event for Chicago if it were to go through. In his interview, Dick said he is long on Chicago but thinks “it needs to do something about its technology environment.” Interesting…I wonder what he has in mind.

When I tried to embed the Wallstrip video here, but it didn’t work (the embed link went to this dead link: wallstrip.cbsnews.comtheshow). Wallstrip was acquired by CBS on Wednesday, and now there are lots of dead links to Wallstrip out there, all with CBS in them, including the one on Wallstrip investor Fred Wilson’s blog linking to the acquisition announcement. Ironically, in his Wallstrip interview Costolo also said he was long on CBS…

Google + Feedburner = big for Chicago

TechCrunch is confirming a $100M term sheet between Google and Chicago based Feedburner, backed by Chicago based DFJ Portage. If this deal goes through, it will make Feedburner the biggest Chicago tech success in recent years…possibly the biggest since Orbitz? Also, assuming Feedburner stays where they are, it will make Chicago a significant non-Mountainview engineering location for Google.

Either way, Feedburner is great. I “burn my feeds” with them for this site and use their site to monitor my blog traffic. I’m a bit doubtful that Google will make $100M in feed based advertising from them, but history has shown that they don’t seem to care about such things.

Where are you?

I was flipping through my FeedBurner site stats today and noticed a couple of random places in my “Top Cities” statistic that piqued my curiosity and I checked my Top Cities list over the past month and saw some interesting results. My top 10 cities by readership over the last 30 days:

1. Chicago – 14.8%
2. New York – 10.0%
3. Washington – 5.4%
4. San Francisco – 4.8%
5. Woodside – 4.8%
6. Oakland – 3.3%
7. San Luis Obispo – 2.7%
8. Hayward – 2.7%
9. Atlanta – 2.4%
10. Los Angeles – 2.4%

The other 47% are spread out over the US and internationally. My readership “nationality” over the last 30 days:

• United States
• Canada
• Serbia
• Germany
• England
• Australia
• Italy
• Belgium
• Singapore
• Latvia
• Spain
• Uruguay
• France
• Israel
• India

This is all based on what FeedBurner tells me and their methodology very well may be screwy, but I’m happy to remain blissfully ignorant for the time being. Pretty cool stuff.

Feed inversion

So I just went through my posts and tagged them all with topics (now listed in the sidebar to the right) and now when I see my post headlines in Netvibes and via Firefox toolbar, they are completely scrambled and almost in a perfectly inverted order, since I edited my most recent post first and my first post last. I think this is feedburner’s fault. Oh well. At least now my recent subscribers will now get more exposure to my older stuff?