After a one-sided rant against blogs a few months ago, Forbes redeems itself with a column on how businesses can “tap” into the blogosphere:
Track And Publish Blogs
A chance meeting three years ago between Salim Ismail and Bob Wyman resulted in PubSub. Wyman is the tech brains, while Ismail is the business guy. They built a matching engine that processes about 3 million newly published blog posts per day from more than 21 million sources.
Tracking tools like PubSub allow companies to monitor what’s being said about them, their products, their competitors and other topics of importance. The tools include a tracker that looks at the top 1% of bloggers. “Companies should set up ’subscriptions’ for keywords and phrases relevant to them,” said Wyman.
Non-blogger Tom Taulli offers decent advice on tapping into the ’sphere, so it’s definitely worth reading.
Update (1/27): Perhaps it was something I picked up subconsciously from the Forbes article that caused me to write that the magazine “sort of” redeemed itself or to note that the author is a non-blogger. Or maybe I just know how journalists think when it comes to blogs. I don’t know. In response to a misquote in the article, B.L. Ochman says this:
In endless debate, deadtree journalists love to bash bloggers, saying we’re not really journalists, that we can say anything we want because we have no editors, we don’t have a code of ethics, that our reporting is sloppy and inaccurate, blah, blah, blah.
Don’t they have editors at Forbes?
What I like about B.L. is her direct blogging style and outspokenness, similar to the way I blog on my personal site. 
A cab driver chronicles her on-the-job life in New York City. Blogging is pervasive, indeed:
Dirt accumulates under her fingernails from handling money all day. She eats hot dogs and brings peanuts for snacking. Once, she had to make an emergency bathroom stop at a passenger’s Brooklyn home.
“The whole way back to the city, I was filled with gratitude, mainly for the fact that I didn’t pee in my pants, but also for the reminder that sometimes humanity can, indeed, be humane,” she wrote.
So far, Plaut says, nothing she would consider “really outlandish” has ever happened while behind the wheel. “Nobody had a baby in the back of the cab,” she said between bites of a cheeseburger at a Brooklyn diner.
Visit Melissa Plaut’s blog.
People make judgments about web sites in less than a second. Hmm. It takes that long? 
From Reuters:
“It really is just a physiological response,” Gitte Lindgaard told Reuters on Tuesday. “So Web designers have to make sure they’re not offending users visually.
“If the first impression is negative, you’ll probably drive people off.”
In the study, researchers discovered that people could rate the visual appeal of sites after seeing them for just one-twentieth of a second. These judgments were not random, the researchers found — sites that were flashed up twice were given similar ratings both times.
Internet harassment, the anonymous kind, is now a federal crime.
The Communications Act of 1934 criminalizes anonymous harassment by a telecommunications device. Congress recently amended the law to criminalize anonymous harassment via the Internet (PDF copy of bill).
Some argue that the law curtails freedom of speech. Perhaps. If someone is blogging or commenting anonymously about a private citizen in an “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, or indecent” manner ” with intent to “annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass,” it is actionable, according to the new law. But should someone have the freedom to do that? Apparently Congress doesn’t think so. What do you think?
Other bloggers: Buzzmachine, Micro Persuasion…
What do you blog about when you’re tapped out? Says Jonathan Kranz:
- Announce something
- Respond to an article or news item (My personal favorite)
- Reflect on an event
- Respond to a reader’s concerns
- Share a personal anecdote
That’s a pretty good list.
