Very interesting commentary about the power of the blogosphere by James Surowiecki. James talks about the value of the entire blog community being able to act together as a collective unit to portray the thoughts and opinions of average citizens in a pretty accurate way. He gives the example of the 2005 Tsunami, where individual bloggers all trying to give their account of their personal experience with the Tsunami, collectively did an excellent job of giving a detail description of the entire Tsunami. He goes on to say that in general bloggers have this ability to collectively give very rich inside information about how most people feel about a certain topic. But he does admit that sometimes bloggers can get caught in being part of the blogging community and let ideas that aren't so common bubble up simply because everyone is talking about them, especially in the political space.
James' talk is very useful because it helps companies and anyone else looking for information and feedback from the general public, realize that blogs can be an excellent resource for this information, as long as a little caution is shown, to make sure that "group think" hasn't disrupted the quality of the feedback.
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