The single most interesting thing about social media is how the individual has been empowered to communicate their ideas and opinions on a global scale. My own blog is a venue for getting out new ideas on the future of business that extends well beyond my friends and co-workers.  Today, you can know quite a bit about someone without ever having met them or had a conversation about them just by reading their blog.

In fact, I stumbled across one of my competitors’ engineer’s bio on LinkedIn that tipped me off that he was working on a new feature for his company’s software. That made me wonder if I could look up my sales peers from other companies and get more insight or find them on FriendFeed and monitor what they are doing. Unfortunately, sales people are not really big into Web 2.0 whereas their sales engineer companions are pretty heavy into all that is new on the tech front.

So, this got me thinking about whether anyone has looked at scraping traffic on mico-blogging sites to determine profiles on users based on their conversations. Obviously, if they keep talking about digital cameras then they probably have an affinity for them. You really can learn more about someone from listening to them rather than looking over their shoulder while they surf the web.

Which leads me back to the title of my post – If you have a lot of important stuff to say, be careful who is listening.

— Added post note 7/14/08: Looks like someone is scraping micro-blogging feeds…summize.com and it is exactly what I thought it would be.  It even refreshes results in real time. Now, that is interesting.

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