On the heels of the AMA blog seminar, it's great to see some more case study material hit the scene. The Yahoo Search Blog is a "A look inside the world of search from the people of Yahoo!", as they say it..

In true blogging fashion, and keeping with the concepts of building the community for the benefit of the community, they have timely, relevant posts, have enabled trackbacks and comments, and even link to the Google blog from their site.

There were audience members today who asked us if the world of the traditional website was changing in the face of weblogs, because, as we (the speakers) said, if you truly want participitory journalism, and you want to grow a community around your brand/company/product/whatever, you need to work from an altruistic platform and include your evangelists, detractors, competitors, and garden variety fans-of-the-brand in the weblog conversation.

Other Yahoo departments considering new product launches are now consulting with her on how to use blogs to beta test and launch upcoming products.

This is one of the greatest strength of blogs: they provide companies a relatively low cost means of conducting market research and obtaining user information from those who are actually using the technology in question. All companies need to create a genuine dialogue between themselves and their customers, and blogs provide an elegant low cost solution to the age old problem of figuring out what the customer wants.