Last weekend, all my RSS feeds that have been managed by Feedburner over the past four years were auto-migrated to Google.

This is a culmination of a process arising from Google’s acquisition of Feedburner in mid 2007 where all RSS feeds hosted by Feedburner will be moved over to a new RSS service Google established.

It’s also related to Google Adsense. Indeed, my RSS feed will carry advertising, just as it has done for the past two years when the Feedburner Ad Network existed. Incidentally, I have no plans to enable advertising in the blog.

One result of the migration of RSS feeds is that the addresses for all feeds change. So, for instance, this site’s primary content feed is now http://feedproxy.google.com/Nevillehobsoncom. That change is transparent, though – you will not notice any difference if you are an RSS subscriber using the previous Feedburner URL (which is http://feeds.feedburner.com/Nevillehobsoncom): you’ll continue to get the content you want in your preferred RSS reader.

All is not smooth for some with migrations, though, as this Known Issues and Workarounds page indicates.

Speaking of RSS readers, I was looking at the stats display to see what RSS readers subscribers were using.

The overwhelming majority of subscribers – about 43 percent – use Google Reader or iGoogle to get the content from this blog. That’s what Google Feedfetcher does (you can see part of the name in the image above): it’s how Google grabs feeds when users subscribe to them in Google Reader or iGoogle.

Next popular is Bloglines at about 23 percent, followed by NewsGator Online at about 12 percent. Then there’s Netvibes at about 7.5 percent, and what the stats define as Windows RSS Platform  – typically, Internet Explorer and Outlook – at a distant 1.7 percent.

I find it quite significant that the majority of subscribers – getting close to 90 percent – subscribe to this blog’s primary RSS feed via a web-based RSS reader rather than with a desktop application (which is my own preference).

Is that an indicator of the appeal of the cloud? Or just that it’s so easy to use a web-based feed reader? (I suspect the latter.)

The ‘Other’ stat is quite interesting. It’s not defined with a number of total subscribers but it takes in all other means by which the balance of subscribers to the total shown in the stats get the content via the RSS feed.

And the stats show an extraordinary number of different RSS aggregators that would fall into the ‘Other’ category – some 83 different methods including some familiar names like FeedDemon, MyYahoo, NetNewsWire, Newsgator Mobile, Firefox Live Bookmarks, Wikio and MySyndicaat.

(I’m noting that four of the products mentioned here – NewsGator Online, FeedDemon, NetNewsWire and Newsgator Mobile – are owned by the same company. Not a bad position.)

What a fragmented market! Although it’s now dominated by Google, it does show the enormously different ways people have at their disposal to get hold of your content.