Did somebody say sacred?

The best way to have an excuse to read blogs all day is to pitch them as a localized story idea, no?

I’ve been surfing through the blogosphere for the better part of the morning looking for some facts and figures on this evolutionary addiction that’s become way more than a trend.

And, believe me, it’s not hard to find information; the problem – for lack of a better word – is the sheer magnitude of the damned thing.

Blogging. Is. Huge.

And it’s not that I didn’t know that before (having been one of the faithful since ’03), but trying to encapsulate it into 20 column inches – about 750 words – is, well, a gargantuan task.

The more popular bloggers tend to be well read in their circles according to genre; like the JS folks tend to stick together, the mommy bloggers, the media bloggers, the political bloggers, the teen bloggers. Birds of a feather, eh?

Businesses, newspapers, who doesn't have a blog these days?

And, of course, the gurus are trying to figure out how best to infiltrate and monopolize such perfectly segmented little consumer market.

Says ad man Steve Rubel to Business Week: Companies have to learn to track what blogs are talking about, pinpoint influential bloggers, and figure out how to buttonhole them, privately and publicly.

Seems nothing is sacred anymore. (But maybe I’m just a little slow and the Internet never was. Do I hear a Blue Ribbon war cry?)

So how are we to know that a not-so-obvious recommendation from one of the mommy bloggers to use Tide laundry detergent isn’t a carefully planted sneeze to jump-start a believable idea virus?

We’re not average people anymore – as if we ever were. We’re communicators with an audience and the advertisers want us, our voices, our subtleties.

The blogs we read like clockwork, the people we think we know through their online journals may very well soon become Influencers recruited to sway. And we won’t even know it – unless of course there’s a mass blogger uprising when the capitalists try to use us to further their own profit agendas.

(Insert evil laughter here.)

Then again, does it depend what they’re offering, morals be damned?

Anyway, I must run before the higher-ups realize I’ve taken the undercover blog research too far and become a blogger myself. Egad.