In the Wall Street Journal, William M. Bulkeley looks at how marketers are taking advantage of new technology solutions to find the "valuable insights" and "useful nuggets" lurking within blogs and other forms of consumer-generated media. There's even an ROI value proposition for these blog tools: "Purveyors of the new methodology and their clients say blog-watching can be cheaper, faster and less biased than such staples of consumer research as focus groups and surveys." As one PR executive explains: "We look at the blogosphere as a focus group with 15 million people going on 24/7 that you can tap into without going behind a one-way mirror."

Some of the folks on Slashdot, though, aren't quite so impressed by these blog-oriented marketing strategies:

"Behold the future of the internet: 50% while be whiny, angsty teens complaining about the world in blogs with poor grammar. The other 50% will be companies data-mining those blogs for insights about what kind of products to market."