BuzzLogic Will Attempt to Identify Influential Blogs

Posted on September 28, 2006

VentureBeat reports that BuzzLogic has raised $1.5 million. BuzzLogic wants to find the most influential blogs using four criteria.

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.

There are a lot of factors that make determing which blogs are the most influential extremely difficult. Trying to determine link patterns and website traffic is difficult by itself, but blogs are also read using rss aggregators and there are a growing number of aggregators. Many of the aggregators don't even report back the number of people who are reading individual blogs so it is impossible to determine exactly how many people are reading a specific blog. The idea of using "contextual relevance" and "frequency" may also be problematic -- a blog may still be very influential in a given field even though the blogger changes subjects and goes off-topic for several posts.