55 Million Blogs, and Now a Service to Track Them

From the New York Times: 55 Million Blogs, and Now a Service to Track Them (HT titusonenine)

LONDON — Corporations are growing increasingly conscious of the power, and potential pitfalls, of blogging. A favorable review from an influential blogger can help generate the kind of buzz around a new product that traditional advertising struggles to achieve. A negative write-up can help doom a product before it even hits the market.

Now many American brands, and some brands in other countries, are starting to include blogs in their marketing plans, and are catering to them at a much earlier stage. By the time of its official introduction, a product may already have been in the hands of bloggers for several months. Feedback from their online discussions with other devotees can help inform a marketer’s subsequent advertising and media strategy.

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Now the Edelman public relations firm is sponsoring development of new Technorati sites in French, German, Italian, Korean and Chinese, involving an investment of “several hundred thousand dollars.” Several of those services, which supplement Technorati’s existing English-language and Japanese sites, began operating in beta (a kind of live test) this month. Until February, they will be available exclusively to Edelman and its clients. After that, the information they generate is to be opened to the public.

“It’s a way of determining in very short order who’s talking positively about you and who’s talking negatively,” said Richard Edelman, chief executive of the public relations firm.

Monitoring blogs can be a huge logistical challenge. There are more than 55 million of them around the world, according to Technorati, and the total is growing by thousands every week.