Only 1% of journalists think blogs are credible but they do read blogs (via backbonemedia).

According to Pew Internet & American Life Project:
The blog-reading audience is about 20% of the size of the newspaper-reading population.
The number of adult readers of blogs is about 40% of the size of the talk radio audience.
Bloggers are often early adopters. Find bloggers who write about your field and let them know about your [...]

People will tell you what they think about your software but they seldom tell software developers what they think about their competitors.
If you don’t know your competitors, you cannot find your position in the market. I constantly monitor Usenet newsgroups for competitors’ names, their product names, URLs, our product names. Moreover, when users ask [...]