Apparently China is blocking RSS traffic coming through FeedBurner. And Dave Winer rightly points out that this is a big problem with having RSS centralized through one source.

Feedburner is a cool service that provides analytic reporting on RSS feeds. They started when RSS was a little tiny baby, have innovated consistently, and have been rewarded with huge marketshare and success. But is insane that I or anyone with a serious analytics package still has to use them.

RSS isn't some exotic experiment anymore. It's just about as fundamental to online success as a home page. It's a significant method of communication and client/user interaction. It's directly connected to our web sites. Why is robust RSS analytics support not available in Omniture, HBX, Google Analytics, or IndexTools?? (These are the ones I use and know don't support it, please comment on the others that should be taken to task.).

When I look at how many visitors my site had today, or how many times a page (particularly blog post or other feed-like tidbit) was displayed, wouldn't including RSS numbers make that data far more accurate and useful? Isn't that what these packages are supposed to do?

I'm sure I have no idea how hard or easy adding this support would be, nor do I really have any appreciation for the ten-mile-long feature wish list these developers are wrestling with. I'll also admit that I really don't care. I'll instead point out what is becoming a recurring theme in my analytics posts; these packages have to start to be judged (and start judging themselves) based on how fully they solve real world problems. Analytics data that excludes RSS is a partial solution.

An example of the RSS readers-per-day summary provided by FeedBurner.