This was a newspaper headline in Metro, which is a free commuter daily paper available in Brussels and suburbs. It can’t be that surprising that organisations like the CIA will scan blogs, but then anyone can by using search engines like technorati and whole host of others that access discussion forums and review sites and other social media. I assume that the CIA and other arms of the US Government will also use “Attentio style tools” to analyse and classify the information into meaningful chunks, but that is just another step in the information value chain to understand trends, new themes, country and language breakdowns. Of course groups like the CIA might use the information differently to companies who just want to see the impact of marketing campaigns or understand people’s views around a topic or product…

This type of headline also shows how the blog concept becomes more mainstream and growth of younger platforms such as myspace, Bebo and now Joga are accelerating this.

As Attentio monitors and measures the impact of blogs and other social media on brands and companies, we thought the following study from Technorati was very interesting. Essentially the blogosphere is doubling in size every 5 months. There are circa 35 million blogs in the Technorati index but many millions more in portals like myspace.com, bebo etc. CEO, David Sifry also points out that every hour there are 50,000 new postings and 70,000 new blogs are created every day.

While many bloggers are linking to mainstream media (MSM) there are some “A-list” blogs that are competing well in number of links (links to a blog or other web site are a useful gauge of that blogs importance). Four blogs, BoingBoing, Engadget, PostSecret and Daily Kos have over 10,000 other blogs linking to them. These blogs have become very hot media properties.

While there are a number of extremely powerful blogs, most fit into the long tail with small number of readers and links, for me this is where the most interesting information is to be found. Going forward, Technorati want that blogs are approachable to readers by the communities they serve, e.g. technology, food, politics so that more people can harness the interesting information within. Added to this they have added an authority function which means if a person is searching for blogs they can in principle remove spam from their search. In a medium where spam blogs (splogs) are such a problem, this is a powerful tool…

London was frenetic with customer meetings, a conversation with a renowned market research journalist and the Blogging4Business seminar. At the seminar there were presentations and panels on what blogging meant for business, how blogs and social media should be tracked and understood by companies and a panel on the growth of podcasting.

While there I met people from IBM, Hitwise, Jupiter, Market Sentinel, Lego, Mercer, Tonic amongst others. What was most fun was the different industries that were coming together, people with journalist backgrounds, advertising, programmers, market research, online measurement etc. It shows that the growth of new industries such as collaborative software, social media tracking and content for blogs and podcasts is drawing in talent from many places. It was also encouraging to see that amongst the different suppliers at the event over half of the attendees where from companies that are starting to use blogs, podcasts and collaborative tools in their organisations. Definitely a good event all in all, next time though they should look for easier access to wireless, this just should come hand in hand with events where blogging is the theme…