Interesting Fact: this is the 210th time we've posted to this blog. Bittersweet Reality: it will be the last.

Our team has used Burning Questions to provide FeedBurner product announcements and stories about the publishers who use FeedBurner since February of 2004. We've laughed, we've cried, we've hackathoned. Above all, we've tried to give you a running play-by-play of the service's evolution from a green page with eight checkboxes to a central hub for publicizing, optimizing, analyzing, and, of course, monetizing all manner of blog, podcast, and commercial content in syndication. (We sheepishly admit a good number of you have spent more time than you'd like troubleshootizing, too. Feeds can be ornery.)

Today we're formally signing off Burning Questions, but not before we direct you to the new, official site for all future updates: the AdSense for Feeds blog. This blog will contain all future updates related to all FeedBurner services. We will soon redirect the Burning Questions feed itself to point to the new blog, so you don't need to update any existing feed (or email) subscriptions. Our first post discusses how you can start managing your feeds from a Google account, rather than from your old feedburner.com account. This is mondo important, as all future feed services, both AdSense-provided and otherwise, will eventually require use of a Google account.

FeedBurner would be just another digging construction guy graphic without your active use of, and involvement in, all aspects of it through the years. As we start tying more closely into other Google products that you may already use, we are eager to give you much more of the get-out-of-the-way, it-just-works joy, simplicity and reliability you deserve from web service like ours with all the benefits that Google's platform provides.

Finally, we must relent and reveal: here is the inspiration for a certain error page. With this last post, you finally have all of our secrets. Good luck, and avoid routines like "20 goto 10." That one required the air brakes.

We've been hinting at this for awhile, but it's finally time to spill the beans: Starting next week, we'll be rolling out AdSense for feeds to a small group of publishers, in anticipation of a full launch to all FeedBurner and AdSense publishers "coming soon". If you start seeing "Ads by Google" on an ad in a feed somewhere, that'd be us.

So what will this mean for you? Well, publishers already in the FeedBurner Ad Network will continue to see premium CPM ads directly sold onto their content, but with the added bonus of contextually targeted ads that will fill up the remainder of their inventory. That means you get the best of both worlds: a dedicated Google sales force that knows how and why to sell onto your content, with the added revenue that full back-fill coverage provides. And with AdSense, you'll know that your back-filled ads are using the strongest contextual ad engine, ensuring the most relevant and profitable ads are delivered to your subscribers. And yes, ads are also sold via Google's AdWords program.

For publishers who are not yet placing ads in their feeds, any publisher who meets the requirements to join the AdSense program will also be able to use AdSense for feeds. You will be able to manage your feed ad units directly from AdSense Setup tab, and track performance right on the AdSense Report tab. You can slice, dice, mix, or mash your tracking across feed units and content units, or keep them totally separate. You're in control. You can still control the frequency and rules around when ads appear in your feeds, without having to mess with templates on your content management system.

You might be wondering what you'll need to do to use AdSense for feeds. You'll learn more about the details when we fully launch, but here are the basics: you will need to sign up for AdSense if you haven't already, and you will want to set up your AdSense channels for "placement targeting" in order to make sure that advertisers can target your syndicated content specifically. As a publisher, you will remain be in control of the campaigns that are targeted at your feed by harnessing the power of Ad Review Center.

And, this is just the beginning of the chocolaty goodness that will come from ongoing integration effort with Google - there are many more "things" and "stuff" yet to come, as we mentioned a few weeks back.

We'll give you the full details on AdSense for feeds, including supported formats, how to sign up, etc., etc. when we're ready for the full launch to all publishers. In the meantime, FeedBurner feeds will continue to be fed as usual, and we'll be reaching out to select publishers individually to try out AdSense for feeds.

There are strange things afoot! (Well, perhaps not "strange," and certainly not just at the Circle K.) In the coming weeks, upon visiting www.feedburner.com, selected publishers will have the opportunity to sign in using their Google Account and experience FeedBurner, now as part of the Google.

If you are among these merry few who migrate early you won't see many changes at first. In fact, you might find yourself saying, "my, it's awfully quiet in here. Almost…too quiet." (But it may look a bit Googlier around the edges.) Your feeds should continue to hum along as they did before, and all of your settings will be yours to manage through your new or existing Google account. This is the same shiny Google account you use to sign into other services at Google.

Following on the footsteps of this account migration, FeedBurner will start to look and feel more like a set of Google services, and we will be completing much tighter integration into other Google services such as Google AdSense. (If you are a feed advertiser, don't worry: we have some happy surprises coming for you as well, and if you are an advertiser who is not yet a feed advertiser, you too shall be blessed with good fortune.)

As part of this Google Account migration, we will need to make a few process changes for our API partners. Effective immediately, the FeedBurner Management API will only be available for existing FeedBurner partners and those Google partners who currently have access to other Google AdSense APIs. The Awareness API will continue to work exactly as it did before, noting that once you migrate to a Google account, you will have to use your Google account credentials IF you use the authenticated API.

If, going forward, you do not want to sign in with a Google account, you can always take your feeds with you by redirecting your subscribers back to your source. Migration will ultimately be here for everybody, including all you MyBrand folks who are master of your domain.

Alright, so we're a little behind on announcing this feature as well. It's been live for weeks and is a real time-saver for everyone involved: the new, self-service Feed Transfer capability. As more and more people build blogs and burn feeds, changes in content ownership and control lead to the desire to move a FeedBurner feed from one account to another. In ye goode olde days, someone who wanted to transfer a feed to another account used to a submit a request to us, and then a staffer in our own Central Planning and Command-Line Voodoo department would verify the accounts and then complete the actual feed transfer. Reliable, but time-consuming and tedious for all parties involved.

Away with workaday drudgery! If you own a feed, you may now transfer it to anyone you like simply by using the Transfer Feed… link, which is listed on your feed's details page and is handily pictured below:

Just provide the email address of the person you wish to transfer this feed to and FeedBurner will send them a transfer request email. The recipient clicks a link in the email and then creates or signs into a FeedBurner account and accepts the transfer on-the-spot. The transfer itself will be completed immediately, moving the feed from your account to theirs. (Please note that only feed owners may initiate transfers from their own accounts to others. Additional how-to info about Feed Transfer is in our Help Center topic.)

We hope this update makes the process of moving feeds around much simpler for all of you. Thanks for letting us know just how popular (and necessary) this feature is!

As we recently posted, FeedBurner's integration into Google is moving along. We've got our coding hats on and are hard at work to get the essential product pieces where they need to be.

However, one somewhat-below-the-radar part of FeedBurner's integration that is already showing up as part of google.com is our new Help Center. (Well, "new" as of late 2007. We admit to being a touch slow on the draw with the PR on this one.) We point this out to show that migrating to a Googley-er tomorrow isn't strictly tied to FeedBurner charts 'n graphs 'n numbers. It used be difficult to find answers; a popup window here, a Forums post there, a blog post over yonder. The Help Center brings sorely needed structure (and searchability) to a bunch of resources that were largely scattered about before. You can now find topics like "What is a Subscriber? How does FeedBurner tally them?", and "Is there a feed file size limit?" in just one place. (We've still got nothing for you on "How can I avoid jury duty selection?") The Help Center will soon introduce new troubleshooting topics and contact options as well.

Speaking of the Forums: they are overdue for the Google treatment, too. We've provided them since shortly after FeedBurner launched as an essential, community-powered companion to the service itself. In the next few weeks, the Forums will move to a new Google Group, with the following benefits:

• Much less spam
• Improved [BUY CH3AP STUFF ONL1NE] search for old topics and conversations
• New email notification options when new topics are posted
• Much, much [FREE V!AGRA NOW] less spam

We also want to point out that FeedBurner Japan is also going to benefit from these Help Center and Groups changes, too. But what about the many other languages FeedBurner publishers use? Google strongly believes in making products accessible to the widest global audience; efforts to formally localize FeedBurner for the most popular and requested languages are under way, going well beyond the options we currently offer.

And, finally: Leap Year post!