As the kids were tucking into the chocolate from their advent calendars this morning I decided that I would try and do something similar on this blog. Every day from now until Christmas, I’ll try to present a number of web resources. Some of these will be obvious well known ones, others may be lesser known and worth a look if you’ve never found them. I already know that if stuck I’ll be looking to other favourite blogs for help so I’ll make sure to credit them whenever that happens. So here’s day 1 – FeedBurner.

FeedBurner is a service which helps you to optimise and distribute your syndicated content. They also now provide an advertising network, leveraging the size of their user base. In their own words:

FeedBurner is the leading provider of media distribution and audience engagement services for blogs and RSS feeds. Our Web-based tools help bloggers, podcasters and commercial publishers promote, deliver and profit from their content on the Web.

The benefits on offer include subscription and clickthru tracking, multiple format feed publishing and editing some of the feed properties such as the Feed title, summary and default image. You also have access to FeedFlare units, these are effectively widgets for feeds which enable easy addition of submit to Digg links or bookmark to Delicious.

FeedBurner stats screenshot

I’ve yet to come across a similar service which works anything like as well as this, since they were aquired by Google, the additional resources available to them has allowed the service to continue to grow. Here are some stats to go “woo” over.
 

• Total feeds: 1,993,406
• Number of publishers: 1,125,264
• Number of podcast and videocast feeds: 249,728