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Google's AdSense for Feeds, the RSS publishing service formerly known as FeedBurner, got a long-overdue refresh today and now displays subscriber and reader interaction stats in real time. When will Google Analytics get real-time stats? That's the question many people are asking - but it's not entirely clear how useful that would be.

Feed subscriber numbers are generally good to know, and revenues from feeds are better than a poke in the eye. But ultimately pageviews are what matter most to publishers. People say that Feedburner has declined in importance because of the rise of Twitter, but no publishing middleware is as important as readers landing on your page itself. There is potential for these kinds of real-time analytics to be leveraged for automated optimization of editorial decision making, but that's a relatively nascent field.

World-changer Evan Williams has stepped down as the CEO of micromessaging social network Twitter, the company announced today, and will pass that role to serial entrepreneur and company COO Dick Costolo. (Above, photo by Joi Ito)

Williams seems to spawn revolutionary publishing platforms with the wave of a hand: Blogger.com, Twitter and, though it didn't work out as well, the podcasting platform Odeo. Costolo is best known to date for his work at Feedburner, the RSS publishing and analytics service bought and squandered by Google. RSS has been widely derided as too hard for consumers and relegated to obscurity "under the hood" - replaced even in the lives of many tech-watchers by Twitter. Costolo is uniquely fortunate to get to steer both of those ships in his career. If his past performance is any indication, his promotion should be very good for Twitter.

The two largest startup ecosystems within the United States are arguably Silicon Valley and New York City, but there's a whole lot of land between the east and west coast. Smack dab in the middle of the country is Chicago, and not long ago we told you about a demo contest hosted by venture consulting firm midVentures that brought a bit of TechCrunch50 flair to the Windy City. This September, the firm is hosting another event in Chicago that looks to be the largest startup conference in the Midwest.

Holding down the proverbial fort for the mid-west, Chicago, the Windy City, is the third largest city in the U.S. and the most populous city that doesn't sit on an ocean coast. The city, which does, however, rest on the shore of Lake Michigan, is home to a unique culture of nearly 3 million people and countless numbers of Fortune 500 companies condensed into its 234 square miles of city. Though the city is often passed over for Silicon Valley and New York in terms of startup cultures, Chicago has a expanding repertoire of companies, entrepreneurs, investors and organizations helping put the city on the startup map.

After years of waiting, FeedBurner users can finally see their stats in Google Analytics. Google acquired FeedBurner in 2007. Since then, there has been a lot of grumbling about how Google handled the transition and the lack of innovation in FeedBurner since the acquisition. The integration with Google Analytics is still hidden and incomplete - right now you can only see feed item click data - but Google promises to slowly add more data in the coming weeks.

According to a new report from website monitoring service Pingdom, Feedburner had an uptime of 99.94% over the last two months. Feedburner, which a lot of publishers use to manage their feeds and get usage statistics, was acquired by Google in 2007, and even though Google has kept the service running, a lot of users have been unhappy with various aspects of the service. With a 99.94% uptime, though, there is good evidence that the core function of the service, making feeds available, stands on solid ground - which, of course, we would expect from a service that runs on Google's servers.

RSS analystics service PostRank.com is putting out a call to feed publishers for feature requests for a new service that will aim to replace the near-dead FeedBurner. The company's initial proposal looks far, far cooler than anything FeedBurner ever did - but after a Google acquisition turned Feedburner from every blogger's best friend into an unreliable annoyance, it's hard not to be cynical.

RSS analystics service PostRank.com is putting out a call to feed publishers for feature requests for a new service that will aim to replace the near-dead FeedBurner. The company's initial proposal looks far, far cooler than anything FeedBurner ever did - but after a Google acquisition turned Feedburner from every blogger's best friend into an unreliable annoyance, it's hard not to be cynical.

PostRank is one of our very favorite services on the web today. Give it any RSS feed and the service will give you a filtered feed of just the most commented on, linked to, saved and Dugg posts from that feed. It's really handy, so we're excited to see what the company can do moving more seriously into the feed publishing and analytics market. Can PostRank pull it off? Below we discuss reasons why they may or may not be able to do so.