However, I have some concerns about this acquisition too, though not necessarily for the same reasons as Todd. After all, Google could certainly discover subscription and reading trends from my use of Google Reader, regardless of the Feedburner stats, so I’m not sure I understand the concerns Todd and others have expressed.

More fundamentally, though — I’m not sure I want to give Google control of my RSS feed. I wasn’t sure I wanted to give Feedburner control, much less Google. They already have my email and RSS reader allegiances — I’m a believer in diversification. Last year I had an issue with a hacker that caused Google to add me to their ‘rogue’s gallery’. Even though I fixed the problem (and hammered my host for their crappy security on the server), it took a week for them to give me my GMail account back and another month before they’d reindex my site. I’m not a big fan of Google slaps, and have enough paranoia in me to wonder whether my feed could be blocked or otherwise misused in the hands of the almighty algorithm.

So we’ll see what they do with it. I don’t believe Google is evil, but I don’t feel like handing my online life over to them in its entirety ether.