Market intelligence firm Umbria is expected to announce an upgrade of its Buzz Report blog-monitoring tool this week, intended to simplify reporting and increase efficiency, reports ClickZ. Buzz Report allows monitoring of conversations on blogs, message boards and chat rooms to track opinions and perceptions around brands, products and competitors.

"We've boiled it down to the highest-impact reports, and added an easy to read one- or two-page summary of the major issues impacting the brand or topic of interest," said Dave Howlett, VP of product management at Umbria, which monitors more than 11 million blogs, message boards and chat rooms.

Umbria will also launch an automated filtering system to eliminate blog spam - blogs that are not representative of blogosphere buzz; and the new release will also measure such demographic factors as geographic location, ethnicity and income level, reports MediaPost. Those features will be rolled out over the next several months, according to Howlett.

The demographic segmentation will make use of natural language processing technology to ascertain a speaker's or writer's age and gender, for example.

Though other buzz-tracking firms, such as Intelliseek and Buzzmetrics, give more weight to influential bloggers, Umbria's is a more broad approach, taking into account "lone bloggers" whose collective opinions can tell a different story from that of A-list bloggers, Howlett said.

Intelliseek updated its BlogPulse tool last week, making influence a bigger part of the equation weighing the source being monitored.