Webware

Facebook likes to trumpet the value of "trusted referrals"--recommendations and ads with the endorsements of members of your friends list. But a new study from Jupiter Research, commissioned by analytics company BuzzLogic, says that consumer purchases are more likely to be influenced by what they read on a blog versus what their social-networking rosters recommend.

Half of all those surveyed who identify as "blog readers" (people who read more than one blog per month, a fifth of total survey respondents) say that blogs are important to them when it comes to making purchasing decisions. But they don't necessarily find them to be all that reliable: only 15 percent of blog readers, and five percent of all those surveyed said that in the past year they had trusted a blog to help them make a purchase decision.

That's still higher than the number of people who said they used social-network recommendations, though: ten percent of "blog readers," and four percent of all those surveyed.

Results of the survey are similar when it comes to advertising: a quarter of "blog readers" say they trust ads on blogs that they read (versus 43 percent on "familiar" or mainstream media sites), but a slightly lower 19 percent say they trust the ads on social networks.

So what does all this mean? Well, it's good news for BuzzLogic, which tracks blogger influence for clients and has seen blog advertising pushed aside a bit on Madison Avenue in favor of "appvertising" and social ads. Aside from that, the real take-away point is that the results seem to indicate most blogs are less mainstream than you might think: Only a fifth of respondents say they read a blog at least once a month.

That's actually really surprising--or maybe blogs have become so ingrained on the Web that people don't even know they're reading them.

BuzzLogic, a start-up that , has pushed its ad network out of beta to a full release.

The "Conversation Ad Network" debuted in beta mode in June and uses BuzzLogic's influence-tracking technology as a way to draw in both advertisers and bloggers. Advertisers are promised access to the most influential bloggers in their niches, and bloggers with that influence are offered more lucrative deals.

Prior to launching the ad network, BuzzLogic purchased ActiveWeave, manufacturer of browser plug-in BlogRovr, to shape it into a tool for clients. Then, during its beta period, the BuzzLogic network enticed bloggers to join by offering them guaranteed $2 CPM (clicks per thousand impressions) ad rates.

"We've seen a strong correlation between campaign effectiveness and the quality blogs our technology is able to surface since launching our targeting platform last year--now we're expanding our targeting approach to our own network of sites," BuzzLogic CEO Rob Crumpler said in a release. "In this fragmented media environment, it has become clear that a popular site isn't necessarily influential when it comes to niche subject areas. Many lesser-known blogs have the capability to deliver great advertising results, they're just not getting paid for it."

There are seemingly zillions of ad networks out there, but BuzzLogic's technology for niche influence targeting gives it a leg up. The company said that over 500 sites have already joined the network in its beta phase.

Updated at 11:50 am on 9/16/08 to clarify the role of Blueprint.

Yahoo isn't wasting time advertising Blueprint, the seasoned mobile development platform that received renewed attentions in San Francisco last week at CTIA 2008. On Tuesday, the company released the most recent fruit of Blueprint's labor, a widget for the mobile application Yahoo Go (review) that peddles Yahoo Buzz, its Digg-like social news service.

From the Yahoo Buzz widget, social newshounds can access a summary of top stories voted on in the previous twelve hours by Yahoo users' popular vote. They'll click for a list of headlines, click again for an image and the low-down, and click a third time to follow links to a mobile browser page with the full story.

While the Buzz widget may have been developed on Blueprint, most users will be more interested in the widget as an alternate news source on Yahoo Go that will rival third-party news widgets and Yahoo's own mainstream and entertainment feeds.

The mobile application Yahoo Go primarily serves as Yahoo's hub for the rainbow of its services--e-mail, headline and sports news, Flickr, weather, maps, and search--though Yahoo has made efforts to open content to outside publishers by inviting developers to create a widgets gallery and by furthermore inviting mobile users to add RSS widgets of their favorite sites. There are some respectable widgets in the public gallery, including Wikipedia, eBay, MTV News, and social networks Facebook and MySpace; however, the gallery is a mere thumbprint by Facebook and iPhone app standards.

You can add the Yahoo Buzz widget to Yahoo Go by searching the widget gallery from within the app or by browsing the Yahoo category. iPhone users can also access Buzz from an optimized site independent of Yahoo Go, not yet a native iPhone app.

Yahoo's Digg-a-like Buzz is opening up to the world tonight. Until now, while anyone could see stories that had been Buzzed and vote them up or down, only about 400 publishers could contribute new links to the service.

A Yahoo spokesperson confirmed that it was always Yahoo's intention to open up Buzz, but that it kept the service restricted while it worked out bugs and refined the product. One might wonder what is so hard about building a site for submitting and rating products. There are tons out there. Yahoo made things a bit more difficult for itself by setting a unique goal for Buzz: it's designed to feed stories to the Yahoo home page. And unlike pure community vote sites like Digg and Reddit, Buzz's algorithms also take into account search engine popularity. (Yahoo's editors still program the Yahoo.com front page manually; Buzz is a feeder system.)

Want some Yahoo juice?

Buzz also can leverage other Yahoo communities. Delicious, Flickr, and Upcoming could get prominent Buzz links to feed items into the system. That won't appear initially, but links the other way will: When you buzz something, you'll also be able to share it on Delicious, or on Digg, StumbleUpon, or other services.

It's tempting to discount Buzz as just another content voting site, but that misses the point. Publishers (like Webware publisher CNET) cannot afford to ignore Buzz, since popular stories on the service can get placement on the Yahoo page, and that could drive large amounts of traffic back. It's a big carrot. Competition for Buzz votes is going to be strong.

I'm still hoping Google buys Digg. That would make things really interesting.

Buzz starts rolling out at 7 p.m PDT Monday. It may take some time for the new features to hit all the company's servers, I was told.

Propeller, AOL's social-news site that's never really managed to catch on, has a brand new look Tuesday. It's the third major rehaul since the service was launched as Netscape.com in mid-2006. Gone are the drab blacks, greens, and oranges from the Netscape.com days along with the teeny, tiny text that made me reach for the Ctrl+ shortcut in my browser. In its place is a more retro scheme with vibrant colors and a banana-shaped mustached mascot.

That's not the biggest change though. The old voting system that mimicked Digg's one vote per user model has been turned on its head with a new one that ranks stories on a scale from 1 to 10 with some of the hottest stories getting play on the front page of Netscape (formerly Propeller.com's domain) and eventually AOL.com.

Propeller's new look is retro--to the max. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: CNET Networks)

The new scoring system is actually a hybrid of any story's play within the Propeller community, combining user votes (called "props") with clicks, user comments, and overall voting velocity. My guess is that while more transparent, this new system won't make a whole lot of sense to people who want to click on a voting button and see a noticeable change. At the moment, coming to the front door of Propeller yields an entire page of stories ranked 10. Newbie users who have come to expect a more standard ranking system on services like Reddit and Digg will be scratching their heads to find the good stuff.

Other changes that are bound to confuse users are the new commenting system and upcoming stories queue.

The comment system throws in a somewhat befuddling five-star ranking system that includes a karma tracker, along with two different ways to expand and contract comment threads to save space. For longer threads you'll have to expand the conversation 25 comments at a time, making it beneficial to jack someone else's thread if only to get higher screen presence.

Likewise, the upcoming stories queue called "Just In" is simply overwhelming. It houses upcoming stories in a similar fashion to Digg Spy, however you can't pause the stream to dig through it, or sort out what types of site activity you want to filter out. In perusing links, simply scrolling down the page made me lose track of a story I was going to come back to. With more users, that same story could fly right off the page.

There is light at the end of the tunnel for Propeller, and that light is groups, a feature that lets people submit and watch stories by interest just like the groups functionality found on FriendFeed. Each user can only create one group (ever), but can join as many as they'd like, something that's bound to change as the service adapts. For now you can browse through a directory of groups and contribute links and discussion once you've joined up.

Propeller still has one huge weapon on its side and that's two pages that get a lot of traffic (Netscape and AOL.com). These can be leveraged to promote some of Propeller's group activity and story promotion. As we've seen with Yahoo's Buzz community, smart leveraging makes people and publishers want to use your tool. In the case of Propeller, we just haven't seen that same system take off. (Pardon the pun.)

BuzzFeed, a start-up trend-tracking site, has received $3.5 million in its first round of funding, the company said Tuesday.

New York-based BuzzFeed tracks and delivers the content that is grabbing the most eyeballs on the Internet. Hearst Interactive Media and Softbank were among the group of investors.

Sure, the company sounds like another Digg clone. What's different about BuzzFeed is that it doesn't rely on votes to determine the popularity of a video, blog, or photo.

The company blends click tracking with its own algorithm and human editors to figure out which piece of content is about to go viral.

Jonah Peretti, one of the founders of The Huffington Post, was among those behind BuzzFeed and he says that the company is in the information business.

For example, advertisers can use BuzzFeed's data to see how their ads are faring among Internet users or to spot emerging trends. That kind of data could conceivably help clothing companies stay on top of the latest fashions.

BuzzFeed was founded in October 2006 and now has a million unique monthly visitors.

Google is starting to share more details about its high priority of making more money off YouTube's popularity, introducing an advertising product on Tuesday called buzz targeting.

The ad product uses an algorithm to find videos that are about to "go viral," when word of mouth (or IM, or blog, or e-mail) promotes a Web site to a phase in which it spreads like wildfire. In this case, ads are overlaid on the bottom fifth of viral videos supplied by YouTube partners who share ad revenue with the search giant.

Making more money off YouTube is Google's "highest priority," Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said in April. The company is working on new YouTube ad possibilities, he said last week.

Until now, YouTube ad campaigns have been more targeted to specific demographics. Buzz targeting adds a broader option, though the ads still are sold as categories such as entertainment or how-to, a YouTube representative said.

Lions Gate was the first advertiser to sign up, using buzz targeting to promote a film, The Forbidden Kingdom, on 500 different videos. "Buzz targeting allowed us to reach a very large, diverse audience," Danielle DePalma, Lions Gate's director of digital media, said in a statement.

This post was updated at 11:18 AM PT to correct the date of the announcement.

Yahoo announced Thursday that it has made some minor upgrades to Buzz, the social news service that it launched in February.

Most notably, the company has released a "Top Buzz" widget that site and blog owners can embed in their Web sites, displaying the top articles in Yahoo Buzz or those from a specific Buzz category. There are also now RSS feeds for stories submitted to Buzz as well as each of its categories, and "First Buzzed By" indicators much like the "Submitted By" taglines on competitor Digg.

Yahoo Buzz remains in a beta test phase, but the company says it's growing fast despite major congestion in the social news and meme-tracking market. New publishers continue to roll into the program, and Yahoo has a perk that even Digg can't offer: placement on the Yahoo front page for heavily "buzzed" stories. That'll get you a lot of eyes.

BuzzLogic, which tracks discussion of clients' companies across blogs and social-media sites and then pinpoints the most influential commenters, has announced plans to acquire software start-up Activeweave for the technology behind a browser plug-in it developed.

That chunk of code is BlogRovr, which produces content from pre-selected "favorite blogs" as Web sites are displayed; if the user loads eBay, for example, a BlogRovr tray within the window might display what tech blogs have been writing about the auction giant recently.

Financial terms were not disclosed, but BuzzLogic's motives were: It wants to apply the BlogRovr technology, which currently monitors about 200,000 blogs, to the services it offers clients in its Conversational Targeting ad program. This BuzzLogic service identifies the most influential bloggers talking about a certain topic to help advertisers figure out where to put their name out. After the acquisition, Activeweave CEO Marc Meyer and Chief Technology Officer Jean Sini will stay on board.

"Activeweave lets (Web users) see the tracks of the people around them, and lets them knowingly lay tracks for others," tech veteran Esther Dyson, an Activeweave investor, explained in a statement from the two companies. "The online world around each user suddenly becomes more relevant and more personal. This acquisition helps BuzzLogic make this dimension available to advertisers."