FeedBurner manages hundreds of thousands of feeds and in doing so, we’ve catalogued thousands of common places where feeds are referenced throughout the Web. These include email clients, web-based feed aggregators, news filters, and more, each outlined in detailed in the Subscriber section of your Analyze tab.
Beyond these known places, FeedBurner can also help identify “Uncommon Uses” of your feed content. These references could be a neat little news filter somebody wrote, a blog somebody assembled from feeds, or even blog spam. Whatever it is, we’ve found that publishers want to see where their content is republished and it’s very helpful to have something like FeedBurner to provide visibility into usage. When FeedBurner identifies an “uncommon” use, we highlight it in your main Dashboard and on the detailed Uncommon Uses page.
There may be sites that show up in your Uncommon Use list that you know (e.g. your own site will be an uncommon reference because it’s not one that we recognize as common across all publishers). You can confirm these as “known” sites with a simple checkbox on the Uncommon Uses page which will remove it from your main Dashboard (you can uncheck it later if you change your mind).
You may ask what you can do if you see a domain using your feed that you feel is not using the feed appropriately (e.g., the feed content is posted on the site without proper credit to the source of the material). In this case, you should contact the domain or the domain host and take up the issue with them directly. You may also want to use the FeedBurner Creative Commons Service (on the Optimize tab) which adds a machine-readable Creative Commons copyright license to your feed. We will be offering further copyright services at a future date.
If you have questions or comments about Uncommon Uses (or anything, really), visit our support forums or drop us a line. We’d love to hear from you!