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Feedburner hacked! from Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on Vimeo.

If you spend days and nights working for the content on your blog and yet wonder why your feed subscriber count remains unchanged, you don’t have to worry any longer. Our good friends over at The Next Web in Amsterdam have come up with an ingenious way to increase your feed count and take it to thousands or whatever number you may desire without a sweat.

The hack is easy the simply created an OPML file and copied the same feed in it 2,500 times. The OPML file was than added to a Netvibes page and Viola. Netvibes thought that 2,500 people have subscribed to blog, where in actuality it was just one guy who subscribed to the feed 2,500 times.

Feed subscribers are an interesting lot as they represent the most loyal readers of a publication as against the daily crowd that might come and go from some social news sharing site out there. This is why some bloggers may feel the urge to inflate their feed subscriber numbers. The above mentioned hack demonstrates how easy it is to do just that.

Naturally other widget providers or startup pages are also not immune to this issue. A fix to this problem to be nailed by reporting the active users of a specific blog instead of reporting every Jack and Tom who might have subscribed to the blog a couple of years back.

But till the industry comes with a fix to this issue, you can satisfy your ego by inflating your feed count.