I thought I would piggy-back on Sterling’s post yesterday regarding the fact that many corporations don’t always hear what’s going on in the metasphere, even though there are many things that are being said.

Prior to the new media, technology for media distribution was inaccessible to the everyman; however, new media technology has radically transformed the way that information is created and distributed.

People are now turning to their friends, whom they naturally trust, and people whom their friends trust as sources of news and information. These groups of people form communities and, through new media technology such as blogs, podcasts, cross-linking, and comment options, engage in conversation with one another. These communities then produce and discuss the stories which they feel are most relevant.

So, what’s the biggest change? I feel that it is the presence of multiple voices, the impact of the technology which gives a voice to the everyman. For example, if an individual wants to learn more about a certain company’s performance on the market, they do not have to rely solely on the Wall Street Journal or Forbes, they can turn to the plurality of voices around them and discover for themselves the relevant, unfiltered information they desire about a company.

People are talking, are you listening?

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It seems pretty clear to me ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, that many CEOs and senior communications professionals still think the blogosphere is much ado about nothing. Maybe they're right? It's really the bogus sphere?

But don't you have to wonder why so much infrastructure is being built up around the social media space? New organizations that, among many other things, help track, follow, rate and rank, link and aggregate the blogosphere… are they all chasing a temporal soap bubble riding the air on a breezy autumn day?

You may recall, for example, this recent post here about a company that is developing technology for detecting the tone and sentiment of documents, including blog posts. Here's another, called Wonkosphere, featured just yesterday in this news release. It is a new web service which tracks and analyzes the political blogosphere.

If nobody important is talking online, if social media is a passing fad, if everything being said in the blogosphere is nothing more than gossip, if the whole thing is transitory and irrelevant, why are so many people listening and why are so many smart people providing solutions to help hear and understand what's being said, by whom and why?

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