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.