According Fortune Magazine, to figure out what the blogsphere is saying about your brand, you would have to pour through 350,000 daily postings on a staggering 20 million blogs worldwide. Daunting? Yes.

Be not afraid - just get out your pocketbook! As companies moblize to monitor social networks and word-of-mouth, they need to prepare to pay for buzz monitoring. There are a number of companies branching in to this arena. Check out this recent recent Fortune article profiles the type of functionality I discussed mentioned in my recent post about social networks and customer service.

The article highlights Umbria Research's technology for scanning the blogosphere for brand-related posts. The technology applies rules, assumptions and logic to categorize and profile brand-related feedback from the blogosphere at an incredibly fast rate. Umbria even claims to be able to approximate blogger profile data, including age/= and sex, in addition to classfiying comments based on tonal qualities, like scarcasm. Businesses can subscribe for Umbria's buzz reporting for roughly $60k, per year, making the service competitive and more affordable than some other competitors (Intelliseek, BuzzMetrics).

Resources: Adrants, via CNN, via Fortune.