Two RSS services deserve a write up today; one an established service with new features, another an experimental new service worthy of more use and attention. I’ll write about the experimental service in Part 2 of today’s posting.

Feedburner is a fantastic company that provides absolutely essential RSS publishing services. I’ve been using and recommending Feedburner for some time because of features offered for months:

• Analytics: Feedburner tracks how many subscribers are actively reading your feed, which items in the feed they have clicked through, what feed readers they are using and more.
• Automatic pinging. While pinging services like Pingoat and Ping-O-Matic are a good way to tell search engines, RSS readers and other services that you have new content on your blog or website that needs to be indexed, Feedburner’s Pingshot service can be set to automatically ping all the major ping services every time you post a new item to your site, and thus to your feed. You will need to make sure that the Feedburner feed URL is findable in your site’s metatags, and Technorati indexes things poorly half the time anyway, but Pingshot is still very effective. My blog posts are findable in every major blog search engine within hours of posting – something that doesn’t happen when pinging is neglected.
• There are many other services that Feedburner has long offered that are really great; one-click subscribe buttons for all the major feedreaders, a browser-viewable RSS page (not just a page of XML code) effective enclosure delivery for podcasts and ads in your feed if that’s what you like.

But here’s the news about Feedburner. Starting this week, a new feature called FeedFlare lets you add a number of widgets at the end of each item in your feed. My favorites are: email this item, del.icio.us tag this item, see what others have tagged this item as in del.icio.us, number of comments to item displayed (works with WordPress blogs only) and display inbound links to this item via Technorati. There are also other features available. This is pretty cool! They call it “building interactivity into every feed item.”

Feedburner is seeing a lot of success as a company. Today they announced a partnership with the Reuters press agency to publish Reuters news feeds. Feedburner says they now work with 100,000+ publishers who represent more than 6 million aggregate subscribers. Good for them. If Feedburner ever gets bought out by a tech-megacorp, I don’t know what I’m going to do.

Technorati Tags: Feedburner, RSS, pinging, blogging, web2.0