the world, or part of it

Ever since the blogosphere encompassed the internet, companies did not act on the goldmine that they received. It is full of countless blogs that offer unbiased advice that can really tell the company what the consumer is interested in. Like I mentioned in a previous, the amount of weblogs on the internet just keep growing and it feels like there is no end in sight. A light bulb has just clicked in their minds that they might want to take full advantage of this while it is still red hot.

Thats why companies are now starting to employ crawlers to scour the internet and find anything in blogs, forums, or social networking sites that may be related to their products. The demand is so high that there are even companies forming that specifically cater to the other companies that need the crawlers. Companies like BuzzMetrics have programs that fetch comments and posts all over the internet and break down the data into related groups. The data then goes to the companies that are those specific fields. It allows large businesses in any industry to capture the buzz around their products or find out what they can do better. Hopefully, the info will be used by more and more companies and everyday products out there can be geared to the consumer much better.

Even companies like NBC saw foresaw the low Olympic viewer ratings because of this technology. The highest buzz was right after the torch was lit, then the chatter went down and down. It was at its worst when people proclaimed that they’d much rather watch American Idol than the “boring” Olympics. But we can all see that as the blogoshere grows, so will the demand for companies to cash in on it. But “cashing in on it” has a bad connotation. Remember, they are doing it to hear out opinion, so the cashing in is really the fruits of our web chatter.