VentureBeat

In the world of online advertising, relevancy is king. Using metrics to determine the online influence of various sites, as BuzzLogic does, has worked well for the company. However, actually being able to follow a user as they traverse the web may provide even more useful data to determine what they are looking for — and looking at. With that in mind, BuzzLogic is acquiring Activeweave, the company behind the popular Firefox add-on BlogRovR.

BuzzLogic currently works by looking at items such as trackbacks and links to determine how influential a blog is in a specific category. Links from other influential blogs are weighted more than links from smaller blogs. The company has a very intuitive visual system to help sort this data. In November of last year it rolled out a way to buy advertisements based on its influential ranking system. This allowed advertisers to get more their buck as their highly relevant ads ensured good click-through rates.

Activeweave was born two and a half years ago with the goal of making the social web more meaningful to users. Since then, the company has made a few products, none more popular than the Firefox add-on, BlogRovR, which has gained over 180,000 registered users. BlogRovR works by following your reading patterns and pulling up relevant content to what you are currently looking at from blogs you like. Think of it kind of like a more immersive StumbleUpon. The two companies had been in talks for a while about working together as they are both all about relevancy.

BuzzLogic intends to fully support BlogRovR just as it is now while utilizing the data it provides to improve its own algorithms. This new data will help BuzzLogic further analyze the conversation, the connection between posts, BuzzLogic chief executive Rob Crumpler told us. The hope is that this will lead to even better performance of the advertising network. The company is also open to looking at other technologies such as Twitter in developing its algorithms further.

BuzzLogic faces competition on the data side from companies such as Collective Intellect, which does analytical reporting on social media. It raised $6.6 million last week to expand operations. Radian6 is another company that analyzes connections in the web 2.0 space.

With the acquisition, Activeweave’s chief technology officer Jean Sini will move over to the same role at BuzzLogic while Activeweave chief executive Marc Meyer will becomes BuzzLogic’s senior vice president of products. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

BuzzLogic raised $2.5 million back in November of last year. Prior to that it had raised $11 million in various rounds. Investors included Adams Capital Management, Transcosmos and Ackerley Partners. Activeweave took angel funding back in 2006.

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Visible Technologies, one of the more prominent companies that helps people and companies track their online identities, has raised $12 million in financing.

Like competitors Buzzlogic, Radian6 and others, Seattle-based Visible Technologies has developed software that tries to find mentions of clients on web sites.

Its Truview product analyzes search engine results on clients, tries to determine if the mentions are positive or negative, then sends a report to the client and tries to connect them directly to the site where the mention was made. Its TruCast product analyzes conversations on blogs, forums and other community sites.

Visible Technologies shows trends in how a company’s brand is being received over time, who the influential people are who are talking about the company, and what parts of the web are giving the company the most attention.

Public relations on the web is a tricky business: The near-limitless amount of information freely available means more things can always be said about a company than a company can realistically respond to, even with such tracking technology. When companies do respond, they risk sounding fake. A string of uniformly bland and positive statements about themselves sounds like PR spin to most people, not independent opinions.

Buzzlogic (our coverage) provides rival products to help clients measure overall traffic to a source site, that site’s number of inbound links and relevance to a client. It also checks for how frequently a site publishes on the topic and how much traffic it sends to the client.

Radian 6 (our coverage) tracks information on sites by analyzing incoming RSS feeds.

The funding was led by Ignition Partners. Visible Technologies previously raised $3.5 million from WPP Group, an advertising conglomerate.

Update: The company is now worth about $30 million, according to some reports.

Buzzlogic, a San Francisco company that tell marketers which blogs are the most influential, is now distributing its online product.

It’s looking pretty good. This is unfortunately not a free software. You’ll have to pay about $12,000 a year.

It tracks conversations around certain topics. And more than just tracking the influence of blogs, it also ranks which topics are getting attention from those influential blogs. Its strength is in the visual portrayal of these conversations and blogs. VentureBeat first covered Buzzlogic here.

(Clarification: The following description is based on a demo of the product centered around bloggers and the American Idol Contest. Buzzlogic did not give me free access to try my own searches, so it isn’t clear to me how well this technology applies beyond this example).

Take, for example, the American Idol contest. Buzzlogic lets you search the names of each of the contestants, and it tells you many blogs are linking to them. It shows how controversial and polarizing contestant Sanjaya Malakar was drawing the most attention (when we first looked at Buzzlogic a couple of weeks ago), while Melinda Doolittle was showing a strong second — even while Chris Sligh was picking up more “recent” posts than Doolittle, showing some sort of momentum. See first graphic below.

You can then find detailed information about each contestant, for example, drilling down into the posts about Melinda Doolittle. There you’ll see what words the most influential bloggers are using in posts about her. Buzzlogic also analyzes text to see whether posts are positive or negative. The posts about Sanjaya Malakar are negative, as you’ll see in the third image below.

Buzzlogic shows who is linking to each blogger, and the quality of links. See image at far bottom. If a popular blogger is getting lots of links from other bloggers, marketers can look at the quality of those incoming links to get an idea about whether that popular blogger is really as influential as they seem. It tries to distinguish between bloggers who are “on topic,” those who are “popular,” and those who are “influential.” Buzzlogic also shows the most influential blog posts on a particular topic (on the topic of Sanjaya, for example, they’re listed on left hand side of bottom image). Still, Buzzlogic has some ways to go. It still measures pure numbers, and not the type of individual readers each blogger is getting. The assumption is that numbers alone measure influence, which is true if you’re Pepsi, and want to sell the most cans of Pepsi as possible. But sometimes, the quality of audience matters. Buzzlogic has done a good job so far, and has lots of fertile ground to till.

Buzzlogic launched last spring, with 25 customers testing the original “alpha” test product. Some 80 customers then began using its “beta” test product, half of those paying. It has since increased the number of beta users to 164. It has 20 employees. It charges $100 a month per conversation tracked. An entry level package of $12,000 a year, therefore, gives you 10 conversations (in the case of this American Idol Contest analysis example, it would all be part of one conversation, and that includes edits to terms, for example, if you wanted to add a date, and analyze the terms “American Idol 2007″.) The annual subscription gives marketers the ability to constantly monitor the influential bloggers in subject areas they care about.

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BuzzLogic, the San Francisco company that helps you find out which blogs are influential, has raised $9.6 million in a first round of venture capital.

It was led by Adams Capital Management, Ackerley Partners and Transcosmos Investments & Business Development.

We wrote about BuzzLogic when it launched in September after raising a seed round of $1.5 million.

The company seeks to define which blogs are shaping conversations online. It uses four criteria to measure a blog:
•overall traffic and number of inbound links
•contextual relevance to a customer’s specified area of concern, such as key words.
•frequency of content publication on such topics
•the traffic it sends back to the marketer

Robert Schettino, the company’s chief marketing officer, said the company has signed up 80 customers for its testing phase, with roughly half of them paying (the basic fee is $500/month).

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San Francisco start-up BuzzLogic is trying to help you sort through the blog clutter. If you’re a marketer or PR person, how do you really know who is an influential blogger and who is not?

BuzzLogic just launched at the DEMO conference, and is homing in on this “influencer” question.

The company seeks to define who is shaping specific conversations in blogs with “algorithms” that analyze relationships, based on four criteria:

–overall traffic and number of inbound links
–contextual relevance to a customer’s specified area of concern, such as key words.
–frequency of content publication on such topics
–the traffic it sends back to the marketer

This is a very difficult thing to do through automation, because links can often be deceptive. As the hundreds of PhDs at Google have found, it is not easy to deconstruct the masses of “link-farms” between Web sites, purposefully created to boost each other’s traffic. We seem to always be one step behind the latest statistics tricks, on traffic numbers too. Rob Crumpler, the company’s chief executive officer, tells us the company has done a lot of work to combat this sort of thing.

If you’re not going for perfection, and want to get a good first take on a short list of bloggers you should care about, BuzzLogic may offer a starting point. “Rather than look at thousands or tens of thousands of blogs, we say here are the 10 or 20 most influential [individuals],” Bob Schettino, the company’s chief marketing officer told ClickZ yesterday.

BuzzLogic is selling a subscription service. As ClickZ points out, there are other “listening” services already offered by companies like Cymfony, Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Waggener Edstrom and Umbria.

BuzzLogic recently raised $1.5 million in seed financing from investors including Ackerley Partners and angel Ron Conway, VentureWire reported (sub required) and which we confirmed. Scott Briggs, former president of Ziff Davis, and Crumpler were also investors. Now that it has launched, BuzzLogic is aiming to raise $6 million in a first venture round.

Update: Here is what the company sent us to explain its pricing:

Our pricing is a function of the number of conversations (queries to surface those conversations) and the number of influencers. For example an outbound marketing person might want to focus their listening and engagement on the top 25 influencers. A customer service manager might want to look much deeper into an issue. Small companies may be able to address brand, product and competitive issues across 10 conversations. Larger companies will need a bigger footprint.

With that as context, our first tier of service starts at 10 conversations x 25 influencers, at $500 a month. The pricing goes up from there depending on the mix.

Our beta program includes a 60-day free trial option of four conversations x 25 influencers.

About a year ago, Dogster, the social networking site for dogs, made some eyebrow-raising news: It had turned profitable.

Now Dogster has raised a round of $1 million from a group of accomplished “angel” investors, to help it step on the gas.

In talking with founder and chief executive Ted Rheingold, we began to discover the real magic behind the site: It is all about the dogs, but then it isn’t really. Sure, dog owners are flocking to the site so that they can post pictures of their dogs, and check out the profiles of other dogs of the same breed, or of other owners in their neighborhood.

But more interestingly, owners are pretending they are the dogs, and writing little diaries, and the diaries are often becoming more about themselves, as seen through their dogs eyes. Take, for example, the “dog of the week,” a dalmatian/labrador retriever (pictured here) named “TK.” You can see all kinds of things on his profile, including character traits, hobbies, and you can also check out his diary. And this is where it gets interesting. As is typical elsewhere on the site, TK’s diary quickly becomes more about “Mommy” or “Daddy,” less about TK. Under pretense of their dogs doing the talking, owners are expressing themselves in all kinds of ways that they wouldn’t normally. See snippet below by the owner of TK:

In fact, owners may find it easier to say things they wouldn’t be able to say on dating sites. Rheingold is seeing all kinds of things — for example, one post was about a dog whose Mommy came home after something called a “date.” The dog said he didn’t know what a date was, but that Mommy said it didn’t go very well, this date, and so the dog said he stayed by her side and tried to make her feel better.

Now that Rheingold has the recipe, he wants to extend his empire, beyond Dogster, and Catster (his second site, also launched in 2004) to cover every pet — horses, birds, fishes, reptiles, you name it.

In April, Dogster and Catster combined raked in $100,000 revenue, a new milestone, and enough to start hiring more people. A three-man team in 2004 has already grown into a ten person team, and more hires are in the works.

It also gave Rheingold confidence to go out and raise cash. He wanted to be sure he had a sustainable business before taking on outside money. While he wants to avoid hiring 16 people immediately and taking $3 million — like some venture capital firms wanted him to do — it is time to pick up the pace.

The lead investor of this round, Michael Parekh, will join the board. Other Dogster investors are Joshua Schacter (of del.icio.us./Yahoo fame), Adam Beguelin (of Truveo/AOL), Michael Tanne (Wink), Jim Young (hotornot), Mike Jones (Userplane/AOL), George Sarlo (Walden Funds), Frank Caufield (Darwin VC), Aydin Senkut (of Google, now Felicis Ventures), Robert Simon (Alta Partners), Brad Feld (Mobius Ventures) and Jeff Clavier (SoftTech VC).

Rheingold says most dog and cat owners — 63 percent of households have a dog or cat — don’t know about the sites, and so it’s time to do some marketing, another reason to take cash. There are more than 70 million dogs and 90 million cats in the country. It is a $36 billion industry, says Parekh.

Dogster served 17 million page views last month. It has 290,000 dog and cat members, and is seeing a steady 7 percent monthly growth in these numbers, Rheingold said.

It is making money through creative advertising packages. Disney paid for a campaign around Lady and the Tramp, and at first said it wanted to buy a $13,000 banner ad. Rheingold warned Disney it might not be happy with such an ad, because it didn’t mesh with other parts of the site’s main activities. For a banner to be appreciated, he suggested, Disney might want to advertise all over Dogster’s site, from newsletters, to the messages Dogster sends to new members — and also let members talk with Lady and with Tramp — all so that the Lady and the Tramp branding could be better understood in the overall context of the site. Disney agreed. There was even a flat-screen TV contest. After the experience, Disney pledged to make the Dogster site a preliminary campaign for all dog-related movies, Rheingold said.