What Is Feedburner and How Do You Get One?

resource- http://www.easywordpress.com/labs/what-is-feedburner-and-how-do-you-get-one/

October 1, 2006 By Gobala Krishnan

You may have heard about a tool called Feedburner (www.feedburner.com). But what is it, exactly, and do you need one?
To put is in simple terms, Feedburner is a feed “enhancer”. It takes your default wordpress feed, and adds more functionality to it without you having to modify it yourself.
If you’ve already had your blog up for some time, chances are your readers may have already subscribed to your default RSS feed. Since you’re using Feedburner, it’s a good idea to make sure everyone is reading the same RSS feed.
Here’s how a default Wordpress feed looks like in Firefox:

Once you redirect your feed via Feedburner, it looks like this:

Once you’re set-up with Feedburner, you can activate all the cool functions, such as allowing your readers to subscribe via email, and also the Feedburner “Flares”.
Flares allow you to add functionality to your feeds, and there are a couple of good ones you’ll definately need to drive more repeat visitors to your blog:

Once you’ve activated the Flares, they will appear in your RSS feed.
There’s only one disadvantage of using Feedburner: you lose control of your RSS feed.
Imagine if you already have thousands of subscribers via Feedburner, and you decide to stop using it (or switch to a similar service) for whatever reason. You won’t be able to tranfer those readers to your new service easily as your Feedburner version has already been published on the Internet on tons of different sites and sources.
That fact aside, using Feedburner will ultimately make your life a whole lot easier. To sign-up, just go to www.Feedburner.com.