FeedBurner redesign, new podcast features

FeedBurner unveiled a new look for their statistics package today and a few new features for premium members. It’s the second major update in FeedBurner’s two years as a company and affects all of FeedBurner’s 140,000 publishers.

FeedBurner subscriber stats

Paid members can now track more information about individual entries such as popularity of a post by day and active readers vs. feed downloads (reach). Members utilizing the free service will notice better graphical data plotted over time, JavaScript tricks that allow you to easily dig deeper into a specific user-agent, and a separate display for user-agents not in the FeedBurner database as known entities. All members can now also track enclosure downloads such as podcasts.

The enclosure tracking is just the first stage for FeedBurner as they “start to develop a more sophisticated picture of download tracking.” I track my podcasts by how much “mind-share” each receives based on how many people tell me they listened and liked it, who blogged about it, and how the podcast’s theme became a topic of general discussion around the time the episode was released. If the stat is capable of measurement by FeedBurner I’m sure they’ll dig into it but I don’t obsess too much over my podcast stats.