The MediaGuardian joins the chorus and warns that mighty corporations ignore the whispers on web diaries at their peril.

So, the blogs are no longer a preserve of the geeks, they are now a jam of the huge corporations. Sorry.

The sites that started as observational home pages for enthusiasts have become so powerful that they are starting a new industry of blog monitoring in which media companies scour the net to advise brands on how their name is being talked about online, away from the traditional newspaper and broadcast media sites.

It is not just computer brands who are starting to realise that the blog is a huge image-making network that cannot be ignored.

Olympus is reported to have devised a 'new marketing strategy' to embrace the medium. Great, does it mean that I can now read a blog by Olympus employees? Not quite:

Whenever a new camera is approaching its launch, details are passed on to prominent blogs, a spokesman reveals, because the sites are crucial to getting interest ahead of the launch as well as getting early feedback on what the public thinks of the new model.

I see. They just included blogs into their PR, marketing and advertising checklist. Tick, we have now embraced the medium. Riiight. I get a sense of deja vu all over again.

But let's not be beastly, at least they have started to notice the conversations about them. Good going, I mean, it's only been five years since Cluetrain.

Then there is an example of what can happen if you do not tune in to the blogger...:

...a flood of bad publicity [came] for Maytag, a top-end washing machine manufacturer in America. Complaints about one of its models not emptying properly, and so smelling out kitchens, had been appearing on many blogs until they finally hit the site of Bob Vila, presenter of a popular property show called This Old House. It resulted in national press coverage of a problem that Clare Hart, CEO of media monitoring agency Factiva, believes could have been nipped in the bud, had the company been alert to the power of the blog.

They fixed the problem and now they monitor the web for early warning signs. That is good, truly a positive development. However, why not join the conversations with your own medium? Granted, a washing machine manufacturer probably cannot see the point of a full-fat blog for themselves but who is to say that they could not make a success of it? I can think of at least a couple of appliance manufacturers that would make a splash with a blog - Smeg and Nespresso.

The article does zoom in on one of the most important features of a blog, credibility. Blogs seem to fit into the picture painted by Trust Barometer, which measures the trust we place in certain types of people. A company CEO is eighth on that list, after specialist business magazines, we trust family and friends and colleagues; journalists are sixth.

So it's a pretty shocking piece of research that shows we trust people who we feel are like ourselves and are not out to promote something. That is why blogs have such power. We trust them, and if we disagree with an opinion, we normally have the option of adding our say.

And there is the inevitable 'power of the blogs' as demonstrated for Blinkx in a recent spate of publicity. Om Malik, one of the journalists in the meeting between Business 2.0 and Kathy Rittweger, CEO of Blinkx, was so impressed that he immediately wrote about it on his blog. She reflects:

He called me to say he'd done a 'blog' on us and I have to confess I was disappointed as it didn't sound as good as an article. Within a couple of hours we were being mentioned on thousands of sites and I had venture capitalists calling me left, right and centre. The blog made us so popular that we had to bring forward our launch from autumn to June.

So what are you waiting for? Get a-blogging!

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