55 Million Blogs, and Now a Service to Track Them - New York Times

55 Million Blogs, and Now a Service to Track Them - New York Times:
A new business model - using tools like technorati to track client's profile. NYTimes required free registration to go to article (NYTimes is worth it anyway - and they don't pay me for this).

"“A year ago, brands were saying, ‘Oh no, not the blogosphere,’ ” said Peter Hirshberg, chief executive of Technorati, a blog-tracking service that last week, in partnership with Edelman, provided results of a global survey of blog use. “Now they’re saying, ‘Great, this is an opportunity.’ ”

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.

Some large corporations have employed specialists like Brandimensions and Nielsen BuzzMetrics to track online chatter about their products and services. And some ad agencies are moving to incorporate such services into their own offerings. Edelman already monitors scores of blogs devoted to following individual clients of the firm, like Wal-Mart Stores."