Business Blogs - "Unfiltered Immediacy"

From a review of Stephen Baker's The Numerati, in the Wall Street Journal, 9/15/08:

"Stephen Baker calls such whizzes [creators of data analysis programs] the Numerati.  Using 'data mining,' they seek out veins of useful ore in the mountains of facts that computers accumulate every day."

"The Numerati are even mining the output of bloggers, those stream-of-consciousness online diarists and self-promoters. 'What makes the blog world especially valuable to marketers,' Mr. Baker writes, is 'its unfiltered immediacy.' What do consumers think of your new product? What desires are still not satisfied by products of this kind? You can commission a poll or wait for the sales figures to come in . . . or you can read the blogs. Better yet, you can hire Numerati to write programs that will read them for you, since there are now more than 20 million bloggers in the U.S. alone."

Comments

[Anne Clelland]

The perception of blogs as created by "stream-of-consciousness online diarists and self-promoters" both challenges and benefits the business model for Handshake 2.0, a high-tech business news blog created by Handshake Media, Inc., a member company of VT KnowledgeWorks.

On the one hand, some powerful people still see blogs in these terms. On the other hand,15% of Fortune 500 companies blog.

While the reviewer's phrase is clever and certainly may apply to some blogs, perhaps most to some personal blogs--and his numbers indicate that for the over 300 million people in the U.S., that's 15 blogs person--his view nonetheless seems dated, passe, even reactionary.