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.

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While the term RSS is well known among the wired, recent surveys show that many people still aren't aware of what RSS is, or even what it can do for them. Well, if you're interested in following updates to most sites these days without actually having to constantly visit them, or if you're interested in having news or search terms delivered to you so that you can keep abreast of a topic important to you, then you need to find out more about how to leverage RSS to make your life easier.

Did you know you can use RSS feeds to easily keep track of sales on eBay Inc. (NASDAQ:EBAY) and Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), hunt for specific search terms, find a job, or deliver the latest specialized news to you? Using RSS to your advantage is important to avoid being overwhelmed in an increasingly information-rich online world.