Google has acquired RSS specialist Feedburner for around $100m.

Feedburner’s customers are said to include the Wall Street Journal, the BBC and Amazon. Retailers and travel agents are now sending promotional offers to online customers via Feedburner.

Google sees the technology as opening the way for its huge array of advertisers to reach some of the most active groups of Web users, like social networkers, or the growing numbers using mobile phones.

Susan Wojcicki, Google’s vice president of product management wrote in her blog, “We’re constantly looking for ways to identify and offer new tools for content creators and Web site publishers,” adding that the purchase helps it provide new tools for its customers.

Feedburner’s analytics also help Web publishers know who reads their sites, as well as embedded advertising in RSS feeds.

Feedburner Co-founder and Chief Executive Dick Costolo told reporters on a conference call, “It is going to get more and more important for publishers to have this round-trip view of their audience.” Costolo is joining the Google board.

This is just the latest in a series of rapid moves by Google to consolidate the fast-growing online advertising market. The deal will expand Google’s existing blog advertising service, AdSense into feeds.

CNN reports, “Feedburner counts more than 430,000 Web site publishers as users of RSS. A total of 736,000 RSS feeds, including roughly 110,000 audio or video feeds, are delivered to readers as publishers update their Web sites, the company said. The 30-employee company will remain based in Chicago.

“Feedburner has raised $10 million from Mobius Venture Capital, Portage Venture Partners, Sutter Hill Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Union Square Ventures. ”

Internet advertising is increasing rapidly on all measures. A need is developing for a big player to step up to the plate and provide a Big-Ad Lite service. Now Google is moving into this marketplace and, as with Adsense, it’s likely to set the standard.

The Wall Street Journal reports :

The biggest Internet companies, including Microsoft Corp., Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc., are focusing attention and money on the emerging business, hoping to be first with the kind of large-scale, dynamic market for the ad industry that the Nasdaq market brought to stocks. […] Today, online publications and Internet companies have space for display ads built into their Web sites. Typically, that space gets filled with ads either the old-fashioned way — through a salesperson — or by a mix of computers and people called an ad network that automatically sells ads for the spot. But a significant portion of the available ad space — called “inventory” — remains unsold, or is sold for next to nothing. Enter the exchanges, which use automated systems to match buyers with sellers of unsold space.

This is good news for a significant swathe of small online businesses stuck between the vast mass of “blogs” beneath and the bigco websites above.

If Google can come up with an automatic solution as simple and seller-friendly as Text Link Ads, with geo-location and other factors built in, it will take mass advertising on the net to a new level. It will also improve the bottom lines of small-business digital networks beyond recognition.

Google’s buy-out of DoubleClick provides the platform. This could be the most exciting development for online business in years, taking advertising from professional operators to ordinary publishers on the shop floor.

If you fancy adding a bit more pizazz to your Google calendar, you can now add your favourite events from a selected list.

The Official Google blog tells us : “Don’t you think that calendars should be more than lists of appointments and meetings? Well, we think an online calendar should be filled with what interests you most, which is why we just unveiled the Google Calendar gallery. Those of you with Google accounts and your friends (who might not have one) can create, share and save your favorite upcoming events directly in Google Calendar. Now you can find all sorts of interesting schedules to add to yours, like these:

Atlantic Records - See your favorite musical artist’s concert schedules.
Cordless Records - Find out where the latest independent artists are playing.
TLC - Keep up to date on new shows on the TLC Channel.
Disney - Plan your family vacation around special events at Disneyland.
Eventful - Track fun events in your local area.
Jambase - Know which live music acts are coming to your area.
NBA - Follow your favorite basketball team, and never miss a game.
Netflix - Find out when your favorite new movies are available on DVD.
Orbitz Deals - See special travel deals next to your personal calendar.
Wcities - Learn about cool happenings in cities across North America.
Zvents - Gather ideas for things to do this weekend.

Take a look for yourself.

Jason Calacanis has launched Mahalo, a search engine with human intervention. It’s still in alpha so we must wait awhile before testing it properly.

The press release FAQ asks if Mahalo is seen as a threat to Google :

“Is this a Google killer? Nothing is going to ‘kill’ Google in my estimation. Google has an amazing search product and the world’s most efficient advertising infrastructure. We plan on partnering with Google for these services just like I did at Weblogs, Inc., AOL and Netscape. That being said, head-to-head Mahalo’s human-powered search results will be much better than Google’s machine-created results—when we do have a result. My feeling is that ultimately people will use Mahalo for popular search terms, and machine-based search engines like Google and Yahoo! for long-tail searches. ”

I searched for Syntagma and yes, it was in there. We came 2nd and 3rd on the list, below Syntagma Square, Athens, but above all the other companies called Syntagma.

What then is the idea behind the human operators? This is from the press release :

Are humans better than machines at creating search results?

Yes and no. Humans cannot possibly create as many search results as machines, nor can they go as deep on each search result. However, humans using machines can create much better search results than machines alone. Our “Guides” use Google, Yahoo, Ask, MSN, Flickr, Delicious, and dozens of other services to hand-craft the cleanest, most organized, and spam-free SeRPs available today.

How much time do you spend building a SeRP? It takes a couple of hours to create a solid search result. However, these results need to be maintained by our Guides on an ongoing basis.

This is an interesting concept and it will be good to watch it mature. Try it out for yourself.