Boy Was I Dumb

As some of you probably know, we pump our RSS feed through Feedburner. Feedburner processes the feed and generates some stats from it. I've always had some misgivings about using Feedburner - if anything should happen to them our feed would go down. In addition, there are some privacy issues - they see the IP address of every click that goes through them.

Unfortunately I didn't trust my gut and went ahead and used Feedburner. In fact, a great many podcasters use Feedburner. It provides a real convenience. But at a cost.

Yesterday Information Week published an article about podcasting quoting Feedburner's VP Business Development, Rick Klau. Klau quoted a figure of 41,000 for our subscribers. This is in direct violation of Feedburners stated privacy policy, and I consider it a real breach of trust. This information is proprietary and they don't have my permission to disclose it to any third party. It also damages us materially since he severely understated our subscriber base. We have 100,000 downloads per show from AOL alone.

I'm moving all my feeds off Feedburner and to a server I can trust - mine. I apologize to you for using Feedburner and for the inconvenience this may cause.

From now on please use the following URL to subscribe to TWiT:

http://leo.am/podcasts/twit

My other podcasts will reside at the following addresses:

KFI: http://leo.am/podcasts/kfi

The Laporte Report: http://leo.am/podcasts/tlr

Security Now!: http://leo.am/podcasts/sn

Radio Leo: http://leo.am/podcasts/leo

I have no idea how I'll change the iTunes feed - there doesn't seem to be any way for podcasters to directly communicate with the high priests at Apple, but I'm sure in time they'll notice.

The Feedburner Feeds will continue to work for a week or so, but I'll terminate them as soon as possible. Sorry for the trouble.