The Guardian (UK) notices that bloggers are becoming a societal tipping point for news:

Dynamic web applications are the future of the internet. Currently the majority of web applications are more or less just forms which may be filled by the user. In dynamic web applications the granularity of changes is at a much more detailed level; e.g. changes in an entry field which is linked to an attribute of a server object may be reflected immediately including verification and dependencies. The seminar will discuss a possible new solution to combine classic web architectures with modern dynamic content behaviour.

Malcolm Gladwell wrote about the disproportionate power of "influencers" years ago in his book "The Tipping Point". What's happened between now and then is easy access to the power of publishing. Becoming an influencer is a lot less difficult now that anyone can grab a megaphone. The liklihood of any one voice rising above the cacophany is still small, but they are far better than they used to be. Glenn Reynolds wrote about this in "An Army of Davids" recently:

"That's exactly right," said Glenn Reynolds, author of An Army of Davids, which explores the explosion in web punditry. "Bloggers and blog-readers are 'influentials' - the minority that pays attention to events outside of political and news cycles. They also tend on average to be better off, better educated and, more importantly, employed."

Just consider the positive impact Scoble has had on Microsoft - or how bloggers have managed to keep various political stories alive long enough for the mainstream media to feel forced to cover them.

For corporate PR and marketing people, this is a brave new world - and that has both positive and negative impacs. Only a few years ago, you could see bad news coming a fairly long ways off - a negative media story would be prepared well ahead of time, and you would often get wind of it before it hit the press (muckraking TV was something of an exception, but most PR people never had to worry about TV). Now, it can be minutes or hours, and a failure to respond quickly can make you look very bad (consider Jef Jarvis' "Dell Hell" posts).

You may not need your own set of influencers, but you certainly need to be tracking what the ones who follow your industry are saying.