I’ve been priveleged in my career to work with some spectacular engineers who time and again have produced ground breaking technology for me to launch. From the first stackable switches, through the first L3 switches, and now AppLogic they’ve placed me on the front lines.

It’s no revelation that over the last few years blogging’s influence in getting a technology into the market has grown dramatically. Bloggers get news out faster and often with more real commentary than the traditional press who tend to rely more and more on vendor provided material. In fact, most good writers now have their own blogs. However, if you’re on the push-end of the process the blogoshpere’s fuidity and inherent noise level makes understanding the traction of your ideas difficult.

As an example I recently found a blog post about AppLogic that suggested we required customers to use modified versions of Apache, JBoss etc. The blogger concluded we were toast for this reason. Of course, we don’t require special versions of software, but where did the information come from. After searching a few links and sending a couple emails I found the source. Someone had read an article but hadn’t used AppLogic, seen our demo or even visited our site. Still, he used AppLogic to make a point in his blog and the missinformation spread.

Enter BuzzLogic. This SaaS offering combines an intelligent crawler, a database and mathematical analysis to track ideas through the internet. Instead of merely looking to see how many links a blogger gets, the system actually tracks how many folks that link later write about the topic. A stronger test of influence. Map this over time, separate the results by topic, and differentiate blogs from media and corporate and you have a LOT of data to work with. And, IMHO, a powerful tool.

As Dave Churbuck from Lenovo notes, BuzzLogic is also valuable for tracking customer satisfaction online. Until I found his post I hadn’t considered that use, but I absolutely plan to follow his lead.

BuzzLogic is still in beta, but their demo is impressive and I’m anxious to get my hands on it. If the product is as good as the demo, BuzzLogic will become an indisspensible tool for launching new technologies.