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We reported this week that Footbag.org, a site for fans of the niche sport that's sometimes referred to as hacky sack, unexpectedly turned out to be one of the most popular RSS feeds on Google Reader, with 74,043 readers. This, we hypothesized with supporting data, was due to Footbag.org's feed being selected as one of only 8 "default feeds" recommended to Google Reader users in the "Sports Bundle".
Except that the feed either didn't exist or didn't load, and there's a good chance none of those subscribers actually wanted to read about Footbag, since it was part of a bundle for people interested in the general topic of Sports.
So how does Google choose which feeds to put in its bundle? In a post titled "Want fries with that feed bundle?", Israel L’Heureux of the Assetbar blog looks at the WhoIs data and shows that the owner of Footbag.org is Steven L Goldberg, a Google manager. In the Mashable comments, meanwhile, different commenters describe Goldberg as "an employee of Google" and "one of the main developers of the Google Reader ".