Vast Active Library and Information Science blog. From a recent library science graduate in Wellington, New Zealand. A focus on reference and current awareness tools and issues, especially free, web-based resources.

 
An intelligent article from CNet on why companies monitor blogs: "online discussions--be it in forums, on blogs or elsewhere--are a modern replacement for customer satisfaction surveys or focus group reports, which can take months to compile and analyze."

The article discusses market research companies who specialise in analysing blog/internet posts, and also points to several free or cheap tools that can be used to do so - Technorati, Google Blog Search, Pubsub [misspelt as Hubsub] and Icerocket.

As an aside, I have a feeling that someone is going to make a lot of money out of developing a comment/opinion search tool - something that truly aggregates collective intelligence on movies, music, consumer products etc. I've just spent long hours using conventional search engines to find consumer opinions about DVD/DVR recorders. The information is out there, but it's scattered and hard to find. If someone could develop a search engine that would let me see what (e.g.) Amazon customers, and Epinions users, and bloggers, and professional and amateur reviewers on other sites were saying about a given product, I'd use that tool a lot.

| posted by Simon at 10:00 am