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Today CityGrid Media announced the acquisition of BuzzLabs, a social media monitoring and sentiment analysis platform. The deal aims to give CityGrid the ability to aggregate and analyze content across its content and ad network, thereby lending valuable consumer insight and trending data to its publishers and merchants. 

BuzzLabs was founded by former Microsoft employees Philip Lee and Dou Shen. CityGrid, which operates properties such as Urbanspoon, Insider Pages and Citysearch, plans to use the BuzzLabs technology to analyze reviews, likes, check-ins, blog posts, etc. .

The acquisition also complements CityGrid Media's merchant product offering by providing reputation management to local merchant advertisers. The BuzzLabs business dashboard will reportedly be integrated into the CityGrid Media Ad Center, enabling local merchants to access BuzzLabs' social monitoring and analysis tools, for example.

Interestingly, this acquisition comes just a few weeks after Salesforce.com shelled out US$ 326 million for Radian6, a rival to BuzzLabs. 

"With the explosion of local, user-generated content on the Web, it is imperative our network of publishers has real-time tools to acquire new content and make sense of it for users in a way that's immediately valuable to them," said Jay Herratti, CEO of CityGrid Media. "By adding BuzzLabs to the CityGrid offering, we are able to provide our publishers with relevant, real-time content and new local data that consumers now rely on to make their decisions."

See it in action here.