March 09, 2006
It's Raining Feeds
This week, FeedBurner's cofounder and CTO, Eric Lunt, was invited to present at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference in San Diego. In addition to a "Feed the Future" presentation, Eric also participated in Marc Hedlund's The Data Dump: Fun with Charts and Graphs session where we were asked to develop a visualization that illustrates a larger theme about the Internet. In our case, we wanted to present the industrywide growth of feeds over the past two years.
As you know, FeedBurner currently manages more than 227,000 text, audio and video feeds for 145,000 publishers with nearly 1,000 new feeds being created every day. In the spirit of the soon-to-be Spring season and to illustrate the rate of this growth, we developed Feedstorm, a visual and audible rainstorm of feed growth. This 90-second visualization is available for your viewing pleasure in both fixed and scalable formats (Flash 8 player required).
Viewer's Guide
- Blue drops represent text feeds, orange drops are podcasts.
- The placement and position of the drops are random.
- The pace at which the drops drop is representative of the general growth curve of all FeedBurner-managed feeds mapped to our actual dataset.
- There are roughly 1,200 drops from start to finish, so imagine that number times 200 for a sense of the actual scale.
- The larger drops are mapped to the emergence of the most highly subscribed feeds.
- Turn on your audio to get a better sense for the initially sparse and then rapidly growing number of rich media feeds.
Comments
I have just signed up to feedburner and I love it! I hope my 27 blogs will get significant traffic increases.
Thanks for all you do.
Hopefully the rain won't extinguish the feedburner...
ha... I kill me!
