When Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) bought RSS company Feedburner, experts seemed to think it made a good match with the search companies big blog business, Blogger. Most people who keep blogs use RSS as a way to get their content out. Google could offer a platform for blogging with Blogger, selling ads with AdSense, and distributing content with FeedBurner.

The system has one flaw. Google did not set up a system for selling ads in Feedburner so that consumers looking at a site's RSS feed would also see targeted ads next to the headlines. It was a break in the system which made it incomplete in terms of helping blogs drive profits.

Google has fixed that. According to Alley Insider, "for content publishers who have long feared RSS as a monetization-killer, AdSense for feeds somewhat levels the playing field." The trouble with running blogs or other small websites is the lack of ways to bring in revenue. Google is offering a partial solution to that.

Of course, since Google keeps a large portion of the AdSense for Feedburner revenue, the huge tech company is looking after its own interests.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com and author of the Ten Stocks Under $10 Newsletter.

Google Inc.'s (NASDAQ:GOOG) acquisition of FeedBurner will only widen its already huge lead over Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) and MIcrosoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) in online advertising. Google's acquisition strategy lately, although coming under scrutiny, is handily beating its closest rival. Will Yahoo! be left behind soon?

Although FeedBurner is not a large company with 431 publishing customers worldwide, the RSS feed generation that the company provides has some large-scale global clients like AOL and The Wall Street Journal. This gives Google a ready-made avenue to sell more products and services in the advertising vein where it currently reigns supreme over the competition. Advertisers are finding blogs an effective way to target small but very passionate audiences, and FeedBurner is a market leader in the providing of RSS feeds for bloggers to global media companies. FeedBurner's acquisition makes Google ever more relevant in the world of information dispersal throughout the world.

I'm left to wonder if Yahoo! was even in the hunt for FeedBurner or whether Google pulled the rug out from under its nemesis once again here. Yahoo! has great reach now with customers and its Project Panama keyword bidding platform shows great promise. But the company needs much more to remain competitive.

Microsoft can't rest easy either. Its recent aQuantive buy was given by Microsoft as giving it a "complete set of tools" in order to more fully compete with Google in the online advertising space. Will FeedBurner up the ante once again as Microsoft struggles to gain share on Google? I'm not 100% sure on that, but Microsoft has to be scratching its head yet again. Perhaps another "tool" Microsoft may want to buy would include a FeedBurner competitor like Technorati.

A couple years ago, I met with the folks at FeedBurner. I really liked the technology but my concern was: is RSS really hitting critical mass?

I'm still not sure. While I think RSS is a great way to distribute content, it still looks like the average Web user doesn't know what it is.

Well, last week, Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) agreed to buy the company. The price tag wasn't disclosed.

To get some insight on the deal, I had a chance to interview Dave Morgan, who is the founder of TACODA and a veteran of the online advertising world.

So will this put RSS on the map?

"Probably. However, I think that the deal is really about Google using RSS to get even closer to publishers and content owners and how they organize, distribute and monetize their content. This gets Google much closer and tighter. It puts them right into their content management systems and into their 'fresh' content -- the stuff that is brand new and being sent to users, which Google would not normally have had a chance to crawl yet."

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including the Complete M&A Handbook and the EDGAR-Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements.

Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) has purchased RSS feed leader FeedBurner. Terms were not disclosed, but the cost was rumored to be about $100 million. The company provides feeds for about 400,000 customers, many of them blogs. It will be a good fit with Google's Blogger platform, which is widely used.

More menacing for Google's competition is the fact that Google will control the largest banner ad serving company, DoubleClick, the premier search text ad business, AdSense, and, with FeedBurner, the largest RSS advertising platform. Firms, including AOL and The Wall Street Journal, participate in the FeedBurner advertising network. Advertising is sold by channels like "business" and "news' with feeds from the appropriate sites banded together.

Once again, it is surprising that Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) and Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) were not buyers. The price of the company was not so high as to be out of reach.

Google's M&A seems to be as good as its search tools.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.

Several sources have confirmed that Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) is in the closing stages of buying RSS management company FeedBurner. The start-up's traffic has increased over 200% in the past year, according to Hitwise. The company describes its business as Web-based tools to help bloggers, podcasters, and commercial publishers promote, deliver, and profit from their content on the Web.

Websites and blogs use FeedBurner to track RSS feeds and traffic to their sites. Google will pay about $100 million for the company.

The RSS feed business is one that has yet to be monetized, but FeedBurner does have a nascent advertising program. With the use of Google's Adsense program, this revenue could almost certainly be pushed up sharply.

Because FeedBurner is an important source of traffic and data for blogs, it also fits well into the Google Blogger platform, which is used to create millions of blogs. Many of these blogs use Adsense to get their revenue. With Feedburner, Google will have "one-stop shopping" that will offer RSS feeds, audience data, and advertising.

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) and Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) could have used FeedBurner to enhance their relationship with the blog and RSS communities, but that's another story.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.