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.

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