Bacon’s Monitors Blogs…Manually?
January 3rd, 2005This story has made the rounds this past week. Bacon’s Information will be monitoring 250 blogs for their client. Good news for the blogosphere, but read this:
“McFarland said her team will “spot check” blogs on a rotating basis, because three editors, together dedicating 60 man hours per week, will not have time to thoroughly fact-check 250 streaming consciousness.”
Is it just me or does this just scream RSS? I would hope that all of these blogs have feeds (if they are in the top 250, then they probably do). Just grab an aggregator, put in the feeds for the 250 blogs, and there you go. Nothing to it. It makes no sense to have three editors work 60 man hours per week (that’s 180 hours per week) manually checking these blogs. I monitor over 400 feeds by myself and it only takes about 2 hours to read, monitor, and analyze the content.
Also, if they are “spot checking” the blogs, then they probably aren’t putting as much credence into the content as they would do with traditional media.