In the Dec 05 issue of “Fortune” magazine ,this article, entitled “Blogging for Dollars” by Justin Martin (p.89) is worth the read.

(I won’t bother to link to their site because its CRAP - they don’t have the article online. Not to mention, they are still showing the Nov. 05 issue as “current” so we know it’s been a while since they updated it. Maybe they can hire Umbria to do some blog research and see how lame I think they are.)

Anyway, the article describes a company named Umbria, who has come up with a logic that will search blogs (presumably RSS feeds) for their clients about companies, products, etc and determine through keywords, the opinions of the people writing it. They also have some way to determine the approximate age group of the writer, depending on what they write through their blog.

Definitely a cool, unique market research segment. Yes, Keener you’re right - Web 2.0 is starting to create all sorts of new, cool things.