This post in the Cool Hunter on using Blogs to find the newest trends is not surprising as blogs can act like barometers forecasting the way the weather will turn.  Here’s excerpts from Melbourne’s The Age newspaper.

"……..A combination of technology and human analysis helps blog-watchers to spot a new trend or marketable product. At a cost of $US30,000 to $US100,000 ($A40,000 to $A133,000) a year, they use technologies known as "natural language processing" and "unstructured data mining" to unscramble the often ungrammatical writing and slang found in the estimated 100 million blogs worldwide."

"Now, however, blog-watching and mining is big business and companies such as Nielsen BuzzMetrics and Cymfony have developed software to sift through and interpret the millions of voices talking in social network sites such as Flickr (http://flickr.com), which hosts blogs and images."

I have been reporting on this all year; it’s an interest of mine but you can’t get use of these tools on the low end, a couple of hundred a year,  (they are very expensive and often need to  be custom programmed).

"…..innovation based on trend information is a hot topic. "We get virtually all of our ‘big spottings’ - consumer behaviour-changing ideas, concepts, big-picture thinking - from blogs written by smart business thinkers such as Jeff Jarvis (http://buzzmachine.com) and Seth Godin (http://www.sethgodin.com),".

I hear the Fashion Industry is also highly influenced by blogs:

"….Today society has less and less time to wait for the prediction of these fashion houses. It is instant and out there on the street."

"And the mainstream is listening to what bloggers have to say. Helen Lee, editor of Australian online fashion and beauty magazine http://sassybella.com, says blogs have changed the fashion scene as people can now get up-to-date information about fashion shows in Paris, Milan, New York and London almost as they happen. "With the popularity of broadband, people can get up-to-date video feeds as well," she says. "Blogs give a magazine-like commentary at the turnover time of newspapers. Whether they’re news blogs or fashion commentary blogs, it all happens a lot faster and you can find out what the latest trend is in Copenhagen or Denver."

But many times, it’s the blog post that drives an article to be written and published due the blog post.

"….Ms Tyson says that as an avid reader of fashion magazines and newspapers, she has found five or six instances of fashion articles that occur "after my blog entries that have the same titles and or print content".