Keeping track of what people are reading about a company’s products on blogs is an inexact science. BuzzLogic will try to make it a little more exact with the acquisition of Activeweave, creator of a popular FireFox browser add-on called BlogRovR that recommends contextual posts from your favorite blogs as you surf the Web.
Already, BuzzLogic is used by marketers to try to figure out who is influencing the conversation about their brands and their competitors. (Much like Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Scout Labs, and Visible Technologies). The subscription service ranks the most influential blogs on any topic based on a dozen factors, such as how many other blogs link to the first blog and how popular the linking blogs are. It is like Techmeme for marketers but subscribers can actually see the rank of each blog and how they are connected to other sites. They can also purchase AdSense ads on the most influential blogs from inside BuzzLogic.
With BlogRovR, which has 180,000 registered users, Buzzlogic will now be able to fill in the other side of the equation. Not who is linking to who, but who is reading what. Consumer blog reading habits will now be layered into its algorithm. Advertisements won’t appear in BlogRoveR itself, but the aggregate reading data it collects will be used by BuzzLogic to help determine which blogs indeed are the most influential and should be targeted by advertisers.
Terms of the deal are not being disclosed. Activeweave has raised less than $1 million from angel investors including Esther Dyson.
