Many bloggers are reporting similar jumps in Feedburner stats. Thirty percent or more seems quite common. My stats increased by 75 readers this weekend. Google Reader is apparently very popular.

Hi. Jordan from Others Online here. Thx for the post. I can totally see why people might view us as a MBL competitor, but that's not entirely the case. In fact, I just read a post yesterday where Eric from MBL confirms they're not at all about increasing blog traffic, but rather focused on connecting bloggers with their readers, providing stats, etc.

In contrast, we're all about increasing your visibility, blog traffic, etc. on a very targeted basis, and connecting people to each other who AREN'T yet readers of each other's blogs (but maybe should be). You know how companies buy keyword-based advertising? Well, think of us as free peer-to-peer targeted promotion -- you tag yourself and then other people see your profile/site when it's relevant to their Web browsing and interests. Perhaps just as importantly, you see relevant people too. We're all about the people.

That said, we're not doing it very well yet. We're prelaunch and still putting a number of the critical pieces in place. The widget you point out (alpha release) is one of them. Lots of other things to do before we can consistently deliver value to users.

Hi Jordan, that's good to know. I might have jumped the gun a bit since the widget and the look was similar to what I am familiar with in terms of MyBlogLog (which I use quite a bit).

I am thinking, based on your comment, I should take a look at Others Online in the future and post some impressions on it. I'm obviously interested in helping bloggers reach their audience and other bloggers.

Thanks for visiting and commenting. I will say when I saw the pop up information as I rolled over an avatar in Others Online, I thought, that's pretty handy!

Thx for the feedback, Jason. I'll go ahead and ping you down the road when I think we're more apt to earn a positive impression!