'This is not a brothel'

As blogs and social media are getting more influence, marketing and PR professionals are looking to find ways to track what's being discussed, to mingle in discussions, approach these blogs with story angles and set up their own blogs. A first step to understand the blogosphere is to set up your own list of relevant blogs and just monitor them daily. With so many blogs being created everyday this can be a real challenge. You just can't read everything, so you need to have a list of the most relevant blogs. There are several ways to do this. One way is to search for lists of influential blogs that some blogs publish. I particularly like the way Marketingfacts is doing this. Every month they publish their Dutch Top 100 Marcom blogs which you can download as an OPML file to upload to your RSS reader. But you can find many examples of these kinds of lists on the web.

Obviously for a lot of blogs that are featured in those lists this is great, as it will increase their traffic even further. But is there also a downside to getting listed as an influential blog? I recently came across a posting of Tom Coates, who's blog Plasticbag.org was listed on prblogger. Since then, Tom says he has been spammed with press releases and PR people trying to persuade him to write about them or their products. Reacting to this, Tom has posted this picture. Take a look at the comments below it to follow the interesting discussion.