Techcrunch reports that Feedburner has acquired blog analytics firm Blogbeat. Feedburner has published an FAQ about the acquisition. From the FAQ:

Blogbeat is an online service that provides insight about what’s happening on your blog including who’s reading, what posts are being read, which content is most popular, and much more.

As the world’s largest manager of syndicated content feeds, our mission is to provide our hundreds of thousands of publishers with the most comprehensive view of how their content is being distributed and consumed online. Our publishers want insight into the relationship between their feed subscribers and their site visitors. We aim to please.

Like FeedBurner, the Blogbeat service uses the feed as a foundation for statistics about blog posts and activity, making it a great complement to our existing platform.

The financial terms of the acquisition are not disclosed, discussed, or even whispered in hushed tones among those in the know.

Blogbeat functionality will be incorporated into FeedBurner’s StandardStats service. A small retirement party has been planned for the Blogbeat logo and brand — you may send balloons to the FeedBurner office.

The initial integration of Blogbeat’s core functionality will be completed during Q4 2006.

In some ways this is a good acquisition for Feedburner; it enhances their core functionality and makes them more attractive to a potential user. However, I have extremely good analytics for Gizbuzz through using a combination of Feedburner to understand readership of the feed, and Google Analytics to understand the website. I am therefore unlikely to be particularly interested in looking at Feedburner’s stats for my blog. However I should say that I have not seen Blogbeat and it may offer blog orientated features which are not available in Analytics, in which case it will certainly be worth a look.