Intelliseek Chief Marketing Officer Pete Blackshaw said the tool can serve advertisers and sellers by allowing them to evaluate how much influence a blogger has over their brands. "The more you know about an author or blogger, the more informed choice you can make about whether you want to sponsor their blog--or, more importantly, should you fear this person," Blackshaw said.

The new tool, currently in beta testing, allows users to see a blogger's rank (determined by how many other bloggers cite them), how that rank has fluctuated over the past month, their recent posts, which other blogs have recently linked to them, which sources they frequently link to, and which bloggers are most influenced by them. "It's not just about the blogger having a lot of reach and influence. It's also about what are the triggers that have in some way shaped or formed--have influenced--the blogger," Blackshaw said.

Additionally, said Blackshaw, a number of paid services are available: Tracking bloggers over a much longer period of time, examining whether they write positively or negatively about selected subjects, and text mining--ranking bloggers on their use of colloquialisms or even profanity, for example. Intelliseek's text-mining capabilities also can find out which books and movies particular bloggers cite most often, or what celebrities they talk about most.

Intelliseek also overhauled the site's layout, moving the most popular features--the conversation tracker and the trend search--to the front page. The revamped site is expected to go live today.

The company also released a newswire service, which aggregates top blog posts, top blogs, top news stories cited by blogs, and top news sources cited by blogs into RSS feeds. Blackshaw said Intelliseek is in talks with online news sites to syndicate a more extensive version of these newswires, but declined to disclose any of the possible partners.

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