Tom Foremski at SiliconValleyWatcher was recently at a panel with Peter Hirshberg, a marketing guy at Technorati.

SiliconValleyWatcher.com: “The selling of the Blogosphere Technorati’s big push into monetizing its treasure trove of data collected about millions of blogs”:

…Technorati has done an enormous amount of work in supporting the early blogging communities, and it has been a strong evangelist for bloggers everywhere through its promotion of blogs and bloggers.

…The subject of the panel was “How the Blogosphere is changing the game in PR and marketing” organized by the PR company Horn Group and nicely moderated by Shannon Latta, a partner of the Horn Group, and the panel included Horn Group’s in-house blogger Blake Barbera, who writes an increasingly popular blog: Wet Feet PR.

…What surprised me was how aggressively Mr Hirshberg was pitching Technorati’s expensive blog tracking services to this audience of agency and corporate communications professionals.

…Mr Hirshberg talked about the current tracking services that Technorati offers, and new products coming that will offer a deeper analysis of web blogs and will assign a value of authority, and other tags. All the better to more accurately distinguish how important a blog post is, the sphere of influence of a particular blogger, and the many number of ways to slice and dice the wealth of blog data Technorati is collecting and selling.

“It’s all about getting the right algorithm” he said at one point, arguing that Technorati’s sophisticated automated services would enable corporations to find out what is being said about them, their people, products, and to respond to bad news very quickly, by engaging bloggers in conversations.

…Technorati is offering services that will help companies control their corporate message by identifying those blogs and their social network, that have posted around the “wrong” message. Then, I would imagine, some sort of corporate “SWAT” team could parachute in and engage those off-message bloggers.

“You need to become involved in the conversation,” Mr Hirshberg strongly advised his audience.

…A lot of blogs are semi-private, their authors are mostly talking with their friends and family, and the discussions are not intended for broad publication.

…This produces a relaxed intimacy of conversation that marketeers prize very highly. And now they can track and eavesdrop on millions of such relaxed conversations, thanks to Technorati’s services, (not cheap either.)

Doc Searls, does a round up, and has a few comments to share.

Mike Sanders, puts it bluntly.