Intelligence from the blogosphere

Keith Schneider reports in the New York Times of Sunday, Dec. 17th 2006 on BuzzMetrics, a Cincinnati, OH firm that monitors the blogosphere for trends and sentiments that are relevant for consumer marketing.
According to Schneider, BuzzMetrics uses search engines that "retrieve phrases, opinions, keywords, sentences and images, and the company runs the data through processing programs powerful enough to sift millions of messages simultaneously. By analyzing vocabulary, language patterns and phrasing, the programs determine whether comments are positive or negative, and whether the authors are men or women, young or old. "

Nothing is said about whether the software can distinguish between people-blogs and robo-blogs. If it can't we might expect competitors try to fool each others by means of massive disinformation generated by robo-blogs.

RAEM