I read an article on slashdot today about a company that analyzes blogs for trends related to corporate products. In the article, US Cellular found out that there is a lot of teenage angst related to running out of minutes on their cell phones. US Cellular decided to give people more minutes based on their blog research.

It's interesting to see the blogosphere gaining influence on corporations and the media. When computers get enough grammical sence and analytical ability to interpret blogs, we'll be able to gauge public opinion on just about everything, without the need to conduct surveys.

I am anxious to do some data mining of my own, my blog database has over 1.7 million entries so far. A relatively easy thing to do would be finding the most frequently used words among different topics. I think I'll start with that, and think of other interestic metrics to calculate.