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.
You know, it is really hard for me to go read a blog, just because there are an X number of links to it.
I go to other blogs when I follow a commentators URL based on liking what they write. I go to other blogs when someone’s blog that I often read does a story on a blog. I go to other blogs when I see my MyBlogLog community friends put a new user as their contact friend.
I am really having trouble with the algorithms. I guess I am just a human kind of guy.
I agree w/ Igor. I go to blogs that interest me and usually find them via other blogs that interest me.
Congratulations Marc and all the other great folks at BlogRovR! Tres Bien!
@Ted: Thanks!
@Igor: I hear you, we’re human too. In fact, we came up with a lot of the ideas behind BlogRovR precisely because of that. We couldn’t stand the sight of our feed readers overflowing with literally thousands of new items every morning, and the ensuing guilt over never getting around to reading them all. RovR evolved to alleviate that pain: it delivers contextually relevant stories from our favorite bloggers right into the browser when we navigate somewhere they talked about.
Thanks for the insightful post, Erick. We’re looking forward to integrating our contextual relevance technology into Buzzlogic’s engine. As I mentioned tonight on our blog, we’re not storing individual click streams, but you correctly point out that there’s value in the *aggregate* attention metrics we can derive from the way users interact with the posts we deliver to them via RovR.
Most of this companies are using the Counting words technology. Some of them identify co-ocurrencies, and if the word Techcrunch is mentioned in the same coment with “like”, that comment is classified as positive. So the comment “The new Techcrunch template looks like sh…” will be counted as positive.
Some other few companies are working in the Natural Language processing field, much more dificult but effective.
I had the chance of testing some of those tools, and they fail in two fields. Hard to understand Interface (like the Buzzlogic) and Word Count Technology (like Buzzlogic).
In Argentina SocialMetrix (www.socialmetrix.com) developed SMXEcho, it has a certainty level higher than 85% and a very simple user interface, which is in my opinion the best tool launched until now.
However there is a lot of work to be done in this field until we can say we have an industry.