From Blog Influentials, a post that suggests:

  (good) bloggers = Influentials

 .".. Market Research of the Future

The interesting thing here is that the IPDI at George Washington U conducted 1,392 online surveys and 1,029 RDD sampled national telephone surveys to confirm their findings. This is expensive market research as is only a snapshot of the respondents views. Comparitively speaking, blog aggregation can be very inexpensive - especially if companies like BlogPule and IceRocket continue to improve their trending tools and/or provide access to low cost aggregated data sets. Perhaps more importantly, monitoring Blog Influentials can provide continuous data.

In the future market researchers may call Intelliseek, Technorati, IceRocket or BlogLines to buy six months worth of political Blog Influential posts, or Female 18-25 Blog Influential posts, or Blog Influentials who have mentioned iPods at least once in the last six months, etc. in much the same way they buy targeted sample lists today. Another product might be just the list of feed addresses (in OPML or some such) for a particular demographic. The researcher could then create their own aggregator, indexes, searchers and trend data. This would eliminate the bias introduced by indexing techniques selected by the blog data vendor - like the removal of English noise words."

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