Chicago-based RSS management company Feedburner is announcing the acquisition of Blogbeat on Monday. The deal will allow Feedburner to expand its reach with customers beyond RSS management. Details as Feedburner.com/blogbeat. We profiled Blogbeat in February. It is a blog analytics service similar to Measure Map (which was itself acquired by Google in February 2006). In a phone conversation last night, Steve Olechowski, Feedburner’s COO, said that they have been looking to build or buy a web analytics product to complement their existing RSS analytics tools. Steve expects full integration of the Blogbeat service with Feedburner by Q4 of this year. At that point Feedburner customers will have the ability to see web and RSS statistics for their blogs in a single dashboard. Terms of the deal are not being disclosed. Blogbeat’s founder, Jeff Turner, has joined Feedburner and will run the web analytics group. → Read More
Google recently indicated that they are taking blogs and measuring blog statistics very seriously with their acquisition of Measure Map. Measure Map had not yet made it into the hands of most bloggers and had been in a private beta at the time of acquisition. A new blog analytics tool that is similar in functionality to Measure Map is BlogBeat. The different with BlogBeat is that it is available to everyone now. A few days ago I installed BlogBeat on my own blog – the installation procedure involved copying a snippet of HTML into the footer template of my WordPress install (it will work with any blogging application where you can edit and access the template). The process of signing up and installing took no longer than a minute, and I was able to instantly see who was accessing my site along with all the other statistics the service provides. BlogBeat will read information about your blog, as well as derive post statistics, from the RSS feed URL that you need to specify. The front page of BlogBeat displays to the user an overview of their traffic stats and highlites trends. You will need to have the code running for a few days to get meaningful data from this front page – for example the monthly summary does not mean much unless you have been running the package for a month (perhaps something that should be hidden until then). The interface to BlogBeat is very simple and clean, not as attractive as the interface for MeasureMap but at the same time very practical. BlogBeat being blog-specific can tell you statistics such as which posts are the most popular, which categories are popular and also tracks comments to tell you which posts are most commented and what the most recent comments are. With post statistics it also displays trends, though with most statistic packages shows you that the fastest growing posts or pages are the most recent (since they didn’t exist yesterday the ‘growth’ is always 600%+) – something else that should be accounted for if the intention is to make clear older posts that may have become popular again for whatever reason (something that is common on my own blog). Further there are areas that describe where your visitors are coming in from, how they have found your blog or a specific post and what keywords have been used to → Read More
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