Writing in The Wall Street Journal's MarketPlace section, William Bulkeley discusses a new technique for tracking consumer opinions of products, companies, and other topics. The article, Marketers Scan Blogs for Insights, explains how marketers, PR departments, and brand consultants are using free and not-so-free tools to scan the so-called "blogosphere."

We tested Intelliseek's BlogPulse on some security topics we've been researching and found it to be an effective tool. There were more blog citations than we found in a Google search, and they were better organized. Also, BlogPulse provides a trending tool to gauge the relative strength of a search term over the past 6 months.

Here we compared "phishing" to "online banking" and found similar activity levels for both terms (click on the inset for a better look).

While this tool won't replace traditional market research, it may be worth checking out from time to time.

--JB