The customer is always right. Especially when the customer can go online and wreak havoc with your company's products and reputation.

Blogs, derivative of the words "Web logs," started out predominately as the rambling, stream-of-consciousness musings and experiences of computer-savvy young people.

Darrell Sapp, Post-Gazette Matthew Hurst, left, Takashi Tomokiyo, Robert Stockton, Natalie Glance and Matthew Siegler work for Intelliseek in Shadyside. Kamal Nigam, far right, recently left Intelliseek for Google. Click photo for larger image.

But lately they've evolved from journals to a form of journalism, ranging from first-hand reporting on world events to shooting down erroneous reports in the mainstream media.

The bloggers are talking about anything and everything. And when they're talking about your business, you want to know about it.

The challenge, however, has been to monitor and measure what bloggers are saying.

Who better to create some of the newest Internet tracking technologies than six self-described "computer geeks" who, cast adrift by the dot.com meltdown, bonded together in a tiny office along Baum Boulevard in Shadyside.

The group, four of whom graduated from Carnegie Mellon University, started out working for WhizBang Labs!, headquartered in Utah. Then, in 2000, they aligned their services with Intelliseek, a Cincinnati-based company that saw the financial potential in knowing what people are saying on the Internet.

Last week, Intelliseek was acquired by Dutch-based VNU, the global information and media conglomerate that owns AC Nielsen and Nielsen Media Research. The new company, with headquarters in New York, Cincinnati and Israel, will be called Nielsen BuzzMetrics.

	Free search engine analyzes blog activity No one tracks the beat of the blogs like BlogPulse, an Internet tool developed at Intelliseek's Pittsburgh office during the computer researchers' spare time. "BlogPulse is a free search engine and Web site that analyzes blog activity," said Sue MacDonald of Intelliseek's media relations office. "Anybody can use it." Though it was developed just for fun, BlogPulse has practical applications. The site -- www.blogpulse.com -- has all the tools a dedicated blogger could want to track what other bloggers are saying and how the "conversation" spreads. According to the site, as of yesterday there were 21,630,464 blogs out there somewhere, 71,996 of which were written in the previous 24 hours. BlogPulse helps you search those sites for just what you're interested in. You can follow the most popular topics. Or you can set up your own programs to track and chart certain search terms and trends. You even can trace the blog links back to their sources. Think of it as a road map to the blogosphere.

"Nielsen, as a company, specializes in media research," said Sue MacDonald, a media relations officer for Intelliseek.

"They measure TV viewership, they measure media audiences and [hooking into the Internet] broadens what Nielsen is going to be able to do, so they're not only going to be able to measure what people are listening to, what they're watching, but also what they're creating and sharing on the Internet."

They call it "consumer-generated media," and the workers in the Applied Research and Development Center in Pittsburgh -- Matthew Hurst, Takashi Tomokiyo, Robert Stockton, Natalie Glance and Matthew Siegler -- are elemental to studying it. The sixth employee, Kamal Nigam, left Intelliseek for Google just before the acquisition was announced.

Many Fortune 1000 companies are well aware that bloggers can have an important "word-of-mouth" influence on people's perceptions and their purchases. Nielsen BuzzMetrics already has more than a hundred clients, including Comcast, Ford, General Motors, HBO, Kraft, Microsoft, Sony, 14 of the top 15 pharmaceutical companies and at least eight television networks.

"The old form of marketing was to have a focus group and to introduce them to the product and see what their reactions are and use that to make decisions about what to do with your product next," Ms. Glance said. "This new form is finding out what the aggregate opinion of people online is."

But this is much more than searching the Internet for key words.

"The English used in a blog is not the English used in the Wall Street Journal," said Mr. Hurst.

The group in Shadyside has devised sophisticated programs that conduct advanced text analysis, techniques that use a combination of machine learning, computational linguistics, natural language processing and data mining. They also track the bloggers' links, determining who is being referenced the most and how much influence those bloggers have.

"There are huge readership numbers," Ms. Glance said. "Some of these most influential bloggers have a readership that is comparable in size to regional newspapers."

It is that readership -- and the ability to react to it -- that not only makes the blogs popular but, contrary to what many people think, credible. Blogs are, Ms. Glance suggests, self-correcting.

"A blogger can say whatever he or she wants, but it gets vetted by everybody else who picks up on it and gives their point of view. And either debunks it or adds more fact to support it."

"For example," Mr. Stockton said, "the primary sources of knowledge about New Orleans, about the bombing in London, about the tsunami -- all of those came from people reporting on the scene in their blogs. They saw what they saw and posted it. And people browsing were able to build a picture from that better than they were from official news sources.

"When the plane goes off the runway in Chicago, the first reports are coming from bloggers in a coffee shop rather than CNN."

With blogs becoming a legitimate data base, it is vital that corporations be aware of what is out there.

And while Intelliseek served its clients well enough, the acquisition by VNU is a giant step for everyone involved at the new Nielsen BuzzMetrics.

"We're going to pick up the Nielsen brand name, the Nielsen reputation for media measurement," said Ms. MacDonald, who expressed confidence that the five-person office in Pittsburgh will be retained because of the new ideas being generated there.

"We like to think there are things happening here that are totally unique and no one else in the world is doing," Mr. Stockton said. "It's exciting."

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Correction/Clarification: (Published Jan. 28, 2006)The name of Intelliseek employee Natalie Glance was misspelled in the original version of this story about bloggers published in Jan. 26, 2006 editions.