Rafat Ali jots a note regarding Trendum including mention of a $3 million investment from AC Nielsen, and former big name clients such as Time Warner, CNN, and HBO. Trendum specializes in monitoring, analyzing, and reporting on various parts of the Internet for their clients' benefit.
On a couple of occasions, I've been given a hard time about why anyone should be interested in better tools for analyzing and understanding the blogosphere. How much analysis do we need of navel gazers, rabble rousers, teenage girls, and cat owners? The money placed in Trendum is a pretty concrete example of why this stuff might be important.