The Blog As Pollster

My partner Robert raves about how quickly MSN is releasing improvements to Spaces. The part that interests me is that the MSN tech team used blogging comments to make its first round of improvements. In days of yore, back in say 2003, months would have gone by. Then they would have had a series of focus groups, targeting certain demographic and psychographically profiled people who were supposed to be too stupid to realize they were being watched from behind a one-way mirror. Then they would have had an online pop up survey, followed by an email survey. Then a committee at Microsoft would have reviewed all this input, then subjectively decided what they believed and what they should fix first. Now, they just tap into resources at NewsGator, Technorati and PubSub and get instant, abundant, candid and thoughtful input from people who care. It's faster and more efficient by orders of magnitude.