Continuing with the theme of popular posts and the blog-o-sphere going totally nuts over Google recently (after confirming the Bill Gates story, we discovered the he was out-shadowed by Google and their recent acquisition of Google)…

In the same strange vein as Mosses’s blog, the first post we read regarding the fact that the PRO Stats and MyBrand features of Feedburner were now free of charge, and that anyone could serve their own feeds from their own servers was from Webware:

FeedBurner’s Stats PRO is just an enhancement to the regular stats that FeedBurner already provides. Most notably, it contains a stat called “reach” and also item views. As opposed to the number of subscribers that is displayed by FeedBurner, reach is a measure of how many people are “actively engaging with your content.” If you want to enable Stats PRO on your account, you have to go and turn it on in your feed’s control panel, though it is free for everyone.

MyBrand is a service that really appeals to larger sites that still want the benefits of using FeedBurner, such as stat tracking, but want everything to be hosted on their own domain. MyBrand lets you host your feed and access all of your stats from your domain to make the whole experience very transparent.

With that said, perhaps it’s better to read it from the horse’s site?

One of the many benefits that FeedBurner publishers will enjoy now that FeedBurner is part of the Google family is a little something we like to call, “more for free!” Beginning today, two of FeedBurner’s previously paid-for services, TotalStats and MyBrand, will be free. Not in the sense of soaring high above the clouds or recently sprung from the hoosegow, but free like you’ll no longer gladly be billed on Tuesday for a burned feed today. We suspect this will be welcome news to the 450,000+ of you using many of our other free services, but understanding that your feed is your feed, you will need to activate these newly freed-up services in order to partake in their awesomeness.

However, in all the fuss and rush, it was clearly Read / Write Web that put together the best article-to-date regarding Google’s recent movements and their ever endless quest for world domination:

Google has been on an acquisition romp since at least October 2006, when they acquired YouTube for $1.65B and wiki company JotSpot at the end of that month. Since that time, Google has not only kept acquiring companies at a rapid rate - but they’ve become the trailblazer for other companies to follow. Google’s $3.1B acquisition of online advertising company DoubleClick was quickly followed by similar acquisitions from rival companies (notably Microsoft’s $6B purchase of aQuantive). Other significant acquisitions by Google this year include Feedburner, Zenter (an online presentations company), and just recently GrandCentral.