Boomerang

According to Reuters (link courtesy of CNET) FeedBurner, which syndicates 346,000 feeds for 212,000 bloggers, has purchased blog analytics company BlogBeat. BlogBeat provides bloggers with real-time information about their blog such as which content is being read by whom, and what is most popular. FeedBurner will be offering the new functionality for free under the FeedBurner StandardStats service. Fee-based services aren’t planned until 2007. For corporate and commercial bloggers, this makes FeedBurner the top choice for blog and feed analytics, particularly now that it is free.

PR Week writes that BMW is using free podcasts, consisting of talks that were delivered at the TED conference in Monterey, CA on February 22-25. The podcasts tie into the latest branding push around the theme of “Great Ideas Become Driving Machines.” Speakers featured on the weekly podcasts include former vice-president Al Gore, New York Times columnist David Pogue, and MacArthur Award recipient Majora Carter. BMW reports that their web traffic has increased since the introduction of the podcasts, and has matched traffic generated from a number of short films released several years ago.

PaidContent reports that the National Hockey League is planning to launch a social network prior to the 2006/2007 hockey season. The site will be named NHL Connect and will allow users to create personal profile pages and share their interests and ideas with others. Users will also be able to share photos, podcasts, video casts, links to articles and content, or even RSS feeds.

The Financial Times‘ Carlos Grande, writing from Cannes, reported that Mark Tutssel, worldwide chief creative officer at the Leo Burnett ad shop is quite fond YouTube, saying, “Marketers must learn to let go of the control they think they have over their brand.” This comes on the heels of news by NBC that it will promote its shows on YouTube.

There’s a report that Blog Mogul Nick Denton, of Gawker Media (which controls 15 sites), plans to sell two blog propoerties; tabloid-centric Sploid and video clip aggregator Screenhead. In addition, editors at Gawker, Wonkette, Gizmodo and Gridskipper were moved or replaced within the network.

According to Denton, his motivations for the reorganization are based on the bubble he perceives that is growing in the market. He says, “The world does not need more blogs and if you count all the pages on MySpace, there’s approximately one reader for every blog out there.”