The rumor mill is in full spin today, as various sources have announced Google’s plans to acquire Feedburner. The acquisition really makes sense - Google is the king of online advertising but has yet to really dive into the RSS market.

A lot of advertising real estate is never even seen, thanks to RSS, the technology behind most of Feedburner’s services. Google would have the opportunity to bring their various advertising products back into many user’s “field of vision” with an RSS advertising product - not to mention giving publishers another form of monetization.

Feedburner also offers a Google Analytics competitor, with their Site Stats Dashboard. An acquisition would bring one more competitor into the fold, which is how Google developed the Analytics product to begin with (the acquisition of Urchin building the product, and the Measure Map acquisition bringing about the latest version). A Feedburner acquisition could lead to a newer version of Analytics that would include a vast array of RSS statistics and analysis (not to mention giving Google direct access to literally thousands of RSS feeds).