Michael Bazeley of the San Jose Mercury News does a nice job of pulling together a number of blog-related news items into a single piece that summarizes organizational awareness of how they can use the blogging phenomenon to their advantage.

First, using products like Blabble, they can monitor what people are saying about their products. Blogpulse from Intelliseek also performs market intelligence based on comments in blogs, allowing marketers to get a sense of what the public thinks. This intelligence allows companies to figure out what questions to ask in subsequent focus groups.

Another impact of blogs, according to the article: “It’s about the digital footprints that bloggers leave behind. Because of their sheer numbers, blogs are becoming one of the largest archives of indexable content on the Web. That means that when someone goes to Google or Yahoo or Ask Jeeves to search for laptop computers, there’s a better than average chance they’ll run across a from-the-heart product review by a blogger.”

Finally, Blazely covers Blogversations, the questionable service that will allow companies to pay bloggers to talk up their products or services.