There's Feedburner, there's Feedsky. Which one should you use?

I've commented before that it's a little silly to stick to one provider without a get-out option: Don't Get Burned. It's much better to take advantage of Feedburner's service via a 302 redirect, so should anything ever happen to Feedburner one can switch RSS providers and users will never have to update their bookmarks, and never notice otherwise.

Feedsky is the Chinese equivalent to Feedburner, hosted within mainland China. Because it's hosted within mainland China, it has an ICP license and is unlikely to be blocked by the authorities (and if it does get blocked, there is recourse). But what about Feedburner? Feedburner provides content from countless websites blocked within mainland China, yet remains unblocked itself. It takes anything and everything, and provides that to whomever wants it. It could conceivably carry some information the Chinese authorities think it shouldn't.

At the moment, RSS is not an established technology in China (and is far from established with the lowest-common-denominator web user in the West), and being somewhat low profile, I do not expect Feedburner to be blocked in China soon. But it may be worth looking into alternatives. This month's blocking of Flickr sent my and some friend's tails into a twist, as the main graphic content of one of our websites was blocked - now there's a lot less colour, content, and is in general less appealing; many of our users who uploaded photos and tagged them with our site name continue to use Flickr, as it's too much of a hassle to move everything, and they never put them up for us explicitly, they tagged them as a favour/an added bonus for some more traffic themselves.

So... what should be done when (if) Feedburner gets blocked? First, don't link your RSS feed to Feedburner, keep a link to your site, then in your .htaccess redirect that URL to the Feedburner feed - this allows you to change feed provider in the future with no effect on your readership, more details here.

Secondly, stay ahead of the curve a bit and try out Feedsky. Rick wasn't overly impressed, but nor was he really disappointed. RSS adoption is yet to take hold, but when it does, the authorities may take an interest.

When the general Chinese population pop their RSS cherry (and that may not happen until they discover it via Vista's desktop widget), whoever is best poised to feed the Chinese Dragon should win out.