Want to Monitor the Unruly Blogosphere? It'll Cost Ya Plenty to Have a Pro Service Do It For You

Fortune Small Business profiles Umbria Market Research's Buzz Reports, a blogosphere monitoring service, which costs "(roughly) $60,000 a year." The article says that Umbria's rivals, which include Intelliseek and BuzzMetrics, charge fees that "can easily run into the seven figures."

I love the way the article describes the blogosphere as "a vast, unruly, and totally tantalizing mother lode of unvarnished consumer opinion on every product and service in the capitalist universe."

Umbria's next frontier: algorithms that will classify bloggers by ethnicity, location, income, social class and level of education. That's more than a little scary!

It only makes sense, it's still pretty much an un-tapped market. IMO, products and services related to blogs will grow quickly and then die off leaving only the ones that makes financial sense much in the same way that the dot com bubble developed in the late 90s.

Blogsearch.google.com? Anyone? Technorati.com? No? OK, here's my 60 grand...