Today's FT reports on a company offering a service to Big Pharma companies that allows them to,"scan weblogs, newsgroups and forums for exchanges of information between patients'. Netrank, a UK company, has been promoting its i-reputation service to GSK, Pfizer and Johnson on the idea that they can,"warn companies of potential side effects". The FT portrays this service as spying...
...but I think it depends on what the information is used for and how the companies react. If they are looking for trouble makers to sue, that's pretty negative. If they are using it to listen and repond, that could be really positive. I wonder how it compares to using PubSub, Feedster, Technorati, Blogpulse etc...
Hope they don't pay to much for the service as Pubsub would do it for free :-)
Posted by: Geoff | May 30, 2005 at 07:19 PM