Lijit seems to have found a suitable partner in acquirer Federated Media Publishing, which boasts a network of premium independent editorially aligned across four major categories with countless content verticals within. Though the press people are saying the companies will operate individually, together the conjoined enterprise will reach nearly 300 million global uniques monthly across 77,000 publishers and 15,000 expert communities.

Lijit alone provides 70,000 small and midsize publishers with easily installable and customizable widgets (including search, analytics and reader tools) in exchange for data collection used for site analysis, vertical optimization and ultimately audience monetization.

About a year ago, Lijit hopped into the display advertising game, offering to serve any percentage of a publisher’s impressions (from just remnant to the full load) while giving publishers the ability to change their agreement or leave at any time. Hooked into all the major DSPs, trading desks and other demand sources, Lijit offered larger content verticals by grouping inventory from several thousand mid-tail sites, most of them affinity-based with highly engaged readers.

This should make a nice match with Federated’s multifarious ad services, including content marketing and distribution and multichannel conversational marketing. While Lijit has an impressive roster of mid-tail clients, Federated’s publisher network boasts some of the largest independent pubs (with dedicated and socially active readerships — about 20% of the visitors across FM’s pubs hail from social media sites) across four categories: FM Tech (which includes BoingBoing, ReadWriteWeb and GigaOm), FM Living (Chictopia, The Awl, The Hairpin) FM Business (Venture Beat, The Next Web and Dealbreaker) and FM Real-Time (Imgur, Tweetmeme, AppleInsider). All in all, the combined entity should be able to offer advertisers a very comprehensive set of sites big and (sorta small) for most content verticals.

But there’s another fun angle — under the tutelage of demand-side tech provider Turn, Lijit introduced real-time bidding capabilities to its platform in June, allowing its publisher base to set CPM price floors and create custom targeting segments. FM and Lijit are planning to build numerous private exchanges in the coming month to enable their publishers to charge higher CPMs for audience targeting on premium content.

Lijit is keeping its Boulder, while most of the executive staff are taking high-ranking rolls at FM. In particular, founder and CEO Todd Vernon will become EVP of Technology at Federated Media; CTO Manny Puentes will become SVP of Technology; and the aforemetioned Knapp will become SVP of Platform Revenue.

Digg poaches Federated Media’s Chief Revenue Officer, Chas Edwards. (Techcrunch)

Yahoo media executive Jeff Dossett heads to AdventureLink as CEO. (AllthingsD)

Casual Gamer Heyzap Raises Over $500K In A Seed Round. (Paidcontent)

Facebook’s New Russian Shareholder Planning Its Own IPO. (NYTimes) I do note that the company owns Web portal mail.ru. So I can complain to him for all that porn spam?

Google tries to remake email as a social network, but it will be a while. (SIA)

Microsoft to EU: cut me down, and Google will rule the world. (The Register)

In a case that should scare web publishers, a federal court said Yahoo could be liable for not deleting a lewd post. (MediaPost) (Of course this is the “controversial 9th Circuit Court of Appeal.”)

MySpace lays off about 45 people. (Techcrunch)

A third of internet users too scared to shop online in because of ID fraud (Mirror)

Techcrunch dumps Federated Media, in a nice way. (Techcrunch)

The Conversational Marketing Toolbox was introduced at to industry execs the Conversational Marketing Summit: New Brand Way in New York City today. The toolbox will attempt to provide an accurate set of campaign management, measurement and reporting tools to interactive marketers using the FM Network.

“One of the greatest barriers that we’ve seen for marketers in social media has been a general lack of standards and tools for campaign measurement and reporting,” said Debra Aho Williamson, analyst at eMarketer, in a released statement. “There are, of course, vendors who supply disconnected data points, but it has so far been up to the marketer to wade through this sea of data themselves. What is needed is a single device or methodology that aggregates relevant data in an easily digestible form.”

The suit of services is built on an open, scalable architecture used to collect, aggregate and report data from internal reporting, third-party tracking providers and social media application developers. That data is available on a dashboard that shows the delivery, engagement, amplification and equity marketing partners have told FM they need.

BuzzLogic is working with FM on the project to help them provide marketers with targeting data.

“Social media is different than traditional media – it’s … social,” BuzzLogic’s blog reads. “But, we know traditional ad models aren’t going to vaporize overnight. Instead, advertisers need to build on traditional measurement models and adapt to the social nature of the Web. Understanding the conversational landscape around an ad campaign makes a huge difference.”

Blogs within the FM network focus on a variety of themes for cars to parenting to entertainment; their superstars include BoingBoing, TechCrunch, Digg and Bleacher Report.