Early in 2005, Jeff Weiner, an executive vice-president of Yahoo, sat back and marvelled at the power of blogs. It was just after the 2004 US presidential campaign in which political bloggers had made themselves felt. And now some 40,000 blogs were springing up every day. And here is what Weiner had to say: “Never in the history of market research has there been a tool like this.”

It is common for blogging to be talked about in hushed tones, as the harbinger of revolution bringing power to the people. But Weiner understood something else. That blogging is as much a tool for big corporations and political campaigns as it is a rebellion against them.

The first thing you need to understand is that there are bloggers and bloggers. One kind, the traditional kind, links to interesting content on the web (it is, literally, a web log or blog, geddit?); a second kind, while referred to as a blog, is more like a newsy, frequently updated website; and then there is the final kind where people log not the web but their own life. Since all use popular blogging software they are all popularly called blogs. But they are very different animals. The newsy websites have been making all the running this week with a fabulous scoop that any newspaper would be pleased with. But the big numbers, the bulk of blogs, are more of the third kind. People, well, they put their personal life on the web for all to read about.

In his entertaining and insightful book The Numerati, the journalist Stephen Baker recounts the huge effort being mounted to survey the so-called blogosphere and glean from it helpful insights to guide companies and identify customers.

A company called Umbria, for example, classifies blogs by gender and age before skimming them for useful market data. It can use sophisticated software to help. The program knows, for example, that someone who punctuates their sentence with the exclamation “!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?” is unlikely to be a middle-aged man.

You can have a go yourself. People provide copious amounts of information about the most extraordinarily intimate and banal things. Type “deodorant” into the Technorati blogging search engine. You will find, just for instance, that someone called topherchris (picture supplied) regarded the following as the top five personal hygiene products he purchased last week - Axe hair paste, Cottonelle toilet paper, Colgate toothpaste, Lever2000 soap, Old Spice anti-perspirant/deodorant. Pf1123, on the other hand, has given up using deodorant altogether. Naomi (30-ish, married, writer) hates toilet paper dispensers that give out one sheet at a time and realised the other day, when halfway to work, that she had forgotten to put on deodorant.

Who needs to organise a focus group when there are thousands of people ready to share their experience of a new brand of toilet paper? Or say what they think of a new advert?

Political bloggers will change the shape of politics. Mass political parties exist because the mass media exists. The central organisation is required to get the message through to the gatekeepers of the media - the corrrespondents and the editors. And now that blogs provide the ability to get across a message to a target audience without using the mass media, the discipline of centralised parties will be weakened.

Yet while blogging will take power from the top, it will also give power to the top. Those with the big data-crunching equipment, employing the best maths graduates, will find that if information really is power, they have just been handed a great deal of it.

Do you engage in WILB? That's workplace internet leisure browsing, in case you wondered. You probably do because 70 per cent of office employees WILB, according to a new study from the University of Melbourne. Shopping is the most usual form.

Don't be embarrassed, though. The study suggests that your browsing is actually making you more productive. Dr Brent Coker says: “People who do surf the internet for fun at work - within a reasonable limit of less than 20 per cent of their total time in the office - are more productive by about 9 per cent than those who don't.” A study of causality did not accompany this quote for the press.

A joke from reader Tom Addison: Two statisticians are out hunting, taking aim at a deer. The first statistician shoots: it's a good shot, but he misses by 5ft to the left. Cursing his luck he fires again, missing this time by 5ft to the right. Suddenly the second statistician starts jumping up and down, shouting, “We hit it! We hit it!”

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