Mining information in blogs from the US DoD

This is probably no surprise since the NSA is mining blogs from MySpace to discover any possible terrorist activities like I pointed out in my blog post here. The Air Force Office of Scientific Research is conducting a study on blogs to look for any information that can help fight terrorism. Valdis Krebs talks more about this in their blog here. Relating to business, there are lots of data that are hidden in blogs and I think businesses are missing the opportunity to harvest that data on possible customers and existing customers. I believe that blogging will become one of those necessary tools just like e-mail has become. Blogging is something that is simple to do, yet powerful in its impact on the network. Of course, one of the things that comes into question, is the privacy of the data and so there will need to be policies for this (which become very difficult and hairy to do).