Another week, another Google acquisition. This time, it's a company called FeedBurner, and while it's a much smaller deal than some of those that Google has made lately – the price was not disclosed, but is rumoured to be about $100 million (£50.5 million) – it is in some ways more interesting.

FeedBurner carved out a niche as a manager of information streams that are based on a protocol called RSS (it stands for Really Simple Syndication). As the name suggests, RSS is primarily a means for an online publisher to give others access to a real-time feed of its content. Readers of NewWest.Net (or of the Times Online) can subscribe to an RSS feed and have our news automatically sent to them, and they can then read it via a special piece of software, which these days is often incorporated into web browsers or a website itself.

A couple of years ago, a lot of pundits predicted that a lot of people would soon be getting most of their news and other information via RSS, and it hasn't quite turned out that way; The percentage of web surfers who actively use RSS remains in the low double-digits at best. But those figures belie its importance.

For RSS is not just a protocol. It embodies a philosophy about how information can and should flow on the internet. In essence, the RSS worldview says that rather than people coming to you for news – visiting your website, navigating according to the way you have organised and prioritised things, clicking on yours links, looking at your ads – you should send the news to them, and let them organise it and personalise it in any way they like.

RSS has been central to the rise of the blogosphere, as it makes it far easier for people to keep track of the latest entries on many different web sites – and thus to link to and comment on those entries. The RSS worldview drove the success of YouTube: any Website can pick up a YouTube video and "embed" it; the video still plays from the YouTube site, but you don't have to go to YouTube.com to see it.

Distributing information in this way is of course a mixed blessing for publishers: it's easier for people to read your stuff, but if they're not paying for it and they're not coming to your site and looking at your ads, how's it all going to add up?

The easiest answer to this is to give away only part of the information stream in the RSS feed. New West RSS offers headlines and the first few sentences of a story, and you have to click back to New West to read the rest. Some publishers go further and offer only headlines in their feeds.

Another answer is to use RSS to allow people to customise their experience on your site. Indeed, RSS is the technology under the hood of many "personalised" news services, by which you can pick which topics you want in your news of the day. (MyUSAToday is one the more recent and ambitious examples of this).

But these solutions are really a way for publishers to push the traditional model of driving people to their sites. Long term, the question remains: how do publishers make a business in a world of distributed content?

FeedBurner was designed to answer this question. If you run your feeds through FeedBurner – as New West does – you get a lot of data on your subscribers, and if you know a lot about your subscribers you should be able to find ways of "monetising" them. Among other things FeedBurner created an advertising network so you can offer ads in your feeds, and while it never got a lot of traction, the potential of this concept probably had a lot to do with Google acquiring the company. Marrying ads and distributed content is, after all, Google's specialty.

If there were popularity contests for companies, FeedBurner would be right at the top. It offers a great service, it's always acted with admirable transparency and concern for customers, and though I don't really know them personally the founders are universally respected as smart, honest, and nice. (Full disclosure: one of New West's investors is also an investor in FeedBurner). It's always great to see the good guys get rewarded, and an acquisition by Google was the logical outcome for a company that, for all its great work, did not itself have an obvious means of making money.

As a publisher, though, I worry that the question "How do we make money in a world of distributed information?" has an increasingly singular answer: leave it to Google. I'm not sure that will be adequate in the long run.

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Jonathan Weber is the founder and editor in chief of NewWest.Net, a regional news service focused on the Rocky Mountain West in the United States. He was previously the co-founder and editor in chief of the Industry Standard