There’s no question that bloggers are increasingly becoming important resources for businesses that want to monitor their own reputation, as well as a source for finding grassroots opinions on other companies and products, and even as a potential source of expertise. But because bloggers do not subscribe to any journalism code of ethics, such as the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ)’s code of ethics it is a good reminder that there is a need to be extra careful about potential undisclosed agendas of certain bloggers.

This isn’t to say of course that the mainstream press is without similar hidden biases–just that there are certain levels of institutional protection, however imperfect. Unfortunately, this is a problem that is going to get worse, not better, as businesses finally discover the power of bloggers. Feel free to share your own strategies on how you currently identify bloggers that might have a hidden conflict of interest.

Wal-Mart Enlists Bloggers in P.R. Campaign

Wal-Mart is looking beyond the mainstream media and working directly with bloggers. But the strategy raises concerns about what bloggers should disclose to readers.

Technorati Tags: mobile, del.icio.us, bookmarks, wireless, wap

I just finished a fascinating phone interview with Emile Servan-Schreiber, the Co-founder and CEO of NewsFutures, a Paris and New York-based firm that helps companies set up prediction markets as a way to forecast trends. I spoke with Emile in regards to a special issue I’m writing about the impact of Web 2.0 on business research for the April issue of The Information Advisor.

This is a fascinating area, which has been given a huge boost in public awareness recently because of New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki’s hot book, The Wisdom of Crowds.

Predictive markets work on the principle that under the right circumstances, groups of ordinary people acting independently will as a whole make more accurate decisions than any individual expert. This has some potentially important implications for market research, forecasting, and other traditional methods businesses have been using to discern industry, product and consumer trends. Already firms like Eli Lilly and Corning have been using predictive markets to help them make better decisions down the road.

A very useful site that tracks a wide range of predictive markets is run by Chris F. Masse on
this site.

prediction markets

I’ve been writing about and trying various RSS Readers for quite awhile now as a way to keep track of my business information news and bloggers, and although these readers are often promoted as a kind of “cure” for information overload, most users eventually discover after the initial excitement wears off, that they start to suffer from RSS Feed information overload.

There’s no single technology solution to this problem, but there are two readers that I’ve found to be particularly helpful, in that they make it easy to set up categories to group your incoming feeds. One is NewzCrawler, a PC-based fee based reader which as a nice Outlook-like interface, and another is a lesser known one called Lektora. Lektora is also useful if you have your own blog, as its companion software is a very handy blog editor program called Qumana.

Let me know if you’ve found a reader that you think helps you out in managing feed overload.

business research
information overload
Lektora
Qumana
NewzCrawler