So what are blogs saying about your business? In the US, where blogging has become a widespread phenomenon, blogger Eric Mattson has just demonstrated in an anecdotal survey that top US companies are much discussed. [Hat tip to John Cass of Backbone media for the link]

The UK situation is different. Athough the last few months has witnessed a huge growth in the use of community sites like mySpace, the majority of bloggers are either hard-core early adopters, or younger people. That still leaves blogs as a smaller scale phenomenon in the UK than in the US as far as most brands are concerned. Pick a UK-focussed brand like John Menzies and the comment count on Technorati is pretty anaemic. 79 comments in the database, and most cut and pasted from online news sources like Reuters and the Scotsman.

The truth is that for most UK industries the bulk of commentary happens in message boards or in other traditional sites. This kind of commentary is technically harder to get at than blog commentary (Technorati won’t be much help) but it’s also less susceptible to infestation by keyword spammers.

Market Sentinel has a number of automotive industry customers and our automotive database is comparatively light on blogs. The majority of these sources are sites which allow customers to review cars, or simply message boards. For the automotive sector at least, blogs are a rather small part of the story thus far.

This is not to say that the automotive industry shouldn’t itself use blogs to communicate with its consumer base – of course it should. And the most enterprising of the online brands are either doing this already or have plans to do so in the near future. But as far as listening is concerned, brands need to spread their nets a little wider than the blogosphere.

[Update] My colleague at our partner Onalytica Flemming Madsen draws attention to a phenomenon which can be made use of in the blogosphere today, and that is something he calls “statistically improbable links” and which we deliver in a branded form as “Stakeholder Spotlight”. That is to say – what urls are disproportionately linked to by the stakeholders in a particular topic? We have found this to be a fascinating predictor of trends and an early indication of problems. Flemming has identified that the Vodafone stakeholders are highlighting a blogger who has a complaint about data charges. For other Market Sentinel customers we have found that this functionality throws up interesting links to companies that might be considered acquisition targets, with the stakeholder group serving almost as a focus group of what might be considered cool and interesting on the web.

The idea is that enough people link they they will build their authority courtesy of Scoble. Of course this only really works if someone else manages to interpose their take on the “brrreeeport” phenomenon and gain relevant authority. (And that’s real authority, not the Technorati sort) And that authority is only valuable in the context of someone searching on the word “brrreeeport”. My interest in this is that it is a text book demonstration, using humans, of what black hat influence brokers are constantly doing with spam blogs/splogs.

But there is an upside. Say if you are a marketer, with a message that you are blogging about. You encourage bloggers to use your message in a link using a particular keyword, and you reward the most imaginative of them with a frontpage link. We were talking to a publisher this morning and this would be super-relevant to them. Each time an author’s name or book title was mentioned in an amusing way the publisher could highlight the link, and share some of the brand’s authority with that blogger. A cool viral campaign.

[Incidentally - I came across this post as a result of a mail from my old friend from Amazon - Dave Mutton - who has launched a cool site called Blogcode . The idea of it is to find blogs similar to mine - kind of opt-in collaborative searching for blogs. Neat idea.]

This was the approach taken to internet search by Altavista around 1997-98. Altavista favoured sites with lots of links over sites with fewer. It worked for a while and made Altavista the most effective internet search engine. Then the spammers discovered that links could be spammed just as effectively as keywords and the Altavista approach failed. The problem is that a link does not have a universal value. A link from a spam site has less value than a link from the New York Times.

This is the weakness of the current Technorati approach. A full analysis of the weakness of the Technorati system can be found by our partner Flemming Madsen here.