In a marriage that makes a lot of sense, FeedBurner has bought Blogbeat, which offers a user-friendly, statistics service for blogs. While many people are familiar with FeedBurner, Blogbeat has been a relatively low-profile player in the stats world behind MeasureMap (now part of Google), Mint, StatsCounter and, most recently, Performancing. I've been using Blogbeat for several months and, for the most part, it's a good service. That said, Blogbeat has been plagued recently by performance issues - perhaps caused by the growing pains of heavy traffic. As well, I'm not sure how successful Blogbeat's subscription service ($24 a year) has been faring. With FeedBurner's financial support, Blogbeat should have the financial resources it needs to improve. This deal is interesting from a big-picture strategic perspective because it offers insight into M&A activity within the blogosphere. Rather than mega-deals, you will probably see smaller transactions as players expand their service portfolios. A growing number of these deals will involve companies that have interesting technology but find themselves running out of cash.

Update: For more, check out the FeedBurner blog, TechCrunch and Likeitmatters.