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.
In 1999 Eng-Sion Tan launched a company called Third Voice, a browser plug-in that created a sidebar on web pages and allowed surfers to annotate the page by adding their comments. The service quickly devolved into web graffiti and shut it’s doors two years later.
Even though Third Voice is gone, the idea had some value. And soon Jean Sini and Marc Meyer will be launching something that has some of the characteristics of Third Voice, but which will not have the same graffiti result. They call it Stickis.
Stickis is still in private alpha. I don’t have credentials yet (they are keeping it very quiet and don’t want screen shots on the web), but Marc and Jean came by last week to give me a peak at the service. You can request an alpha invitation on their home page.
To be honest, it took me a while to get it. The reason: they’ve built a platform that has at least two or three killer applications and I saw so much in so short a time that I was getting lost. I slowed things down by asking dumb questions and, in the process became pretty fired up about stickis in general.
Once you are registered, you can add a “sticki” to any web page with your notes, which can be in the form of text or dragged in images. Every time you return to that page you can pull up your sticki. For lots of sites that I interact with, the ability to keep these notes is very interesting. Notes can be shared with friends or kept private.
You can also subscribe to feeds from other sites, and if those feeds have linked to the current site you are visiting that content will also appear in the stickis. For instance, If you were to go to the Sticki site, and you had subscribed to the TechCrunch feed, you would see this post included in the sticki.
They’ve also included a master page to manage the content you’ve distributed on various pages, and add feeds and friend’s content.
Marc and Jean are in the process of raising an angel round – everything to date has been created on their own dime and with their own time. They’ve been working on it for about a year.
