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.

A piece in today's New York Times reports on the bleak outlook for the newspaper industry. Last year, brought the second-worst decline in ad revenue in more than 60 years, with only 2001, a recession, coming in worse.

Essentially, newspaper advertising broke its cyclical mold -- booming and fading with the broader economy. There was a substantial decline in 2007 unaccompanied by broader economic woes. Print circulation is down, and according to the Times online revenue can't make up the gap: "... for every dollar advertisers pay to reach a print reader, they pay about 5 cents, on average, to reach an Internet reader. Newspapers need to narrow that gap, but the rise in Internet revenue slowed sharply last year."

The problem for most newspapers is that they are finding themselves without much of a moat on the internet -- Being the major newspaper in a small city is very different from competing with literally everyone else for web traffic. News aggregators such as Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO), and RSS feeds are probably killing newspapers.

Warren Buffett was once a big fan of small newspapers but unfortunately, all the reasons he liked them are no longer true: They don't have monopolies anymore. You can set up My Yahoo! to deliver you local news and there's just no reason to buy a newspaper for national news with the wealth of online resources available.

Newspapers aren't dead yet but they're definitely dying and I can't think of anything that could possibly reverse it.

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.

Microsoft has a habit recently of deploying very good software solutions with little to no fanfare, or connected to other pieces of software in an attempt to be the escapable "one stop shop" solution for many computing needs. One such beast is the newer "Microsoft Max" (what is with the name?), an integrated RSS feedreader being distributed with the Microsoft Max photo viewing and sharing software. Actually, the name "Max" pertains to the photo software, and the RSS reader functionality just comes along for the ride.

Arrington over at TechCrunch gives a pretty decent review of Microsoft's RSS reader in a blog post, and the question to me immediately came to mind -- why didn't Microsoft release the RSS reader function within the Microsoft Max software package as a standalone product? From what Arrington describes, Microsoft's stab at an RSS reader is excellent. It's well-done, easy to use and organizes news information into a very neat package for reading.

With very decent desktop RSS newsreaders like NewsGator and FeedDemon already in use by millions, Microsoft's new RSS "widget" (if that's fair) would seem to be introducing a very good level of competition soon when Windows Vista is released. That's just a hypothesis, but I'm sure that Microsoft will release this RSS functionality right on the desktop with Windows Vista when it is made public.

If you've beta-tested the latest Vista Release Candidate 1, is there a decent RSS program built-in? Internet Explorer 7 already has a decent RSS reader built-in, but this one inside the "Microsoft Max" photo software looks slicker than any I've seen. As the world moves over time to having web stories and news come to them in an RSS format instead of "going out" to multiple websites for information, Microsoft's move here will be a good one.