"Geekfest, you scoff?"

Trying to find an interesting article about metadata and knowledge sharing, I stumbled across this article: "Holy Knowledge Sharing, Batman!" on the site KMEdge.com (the KM is for Knowledge Sharing). While this article leaves something to be desired in terms of academic rigor and depth - it raises interesting points: Comic-Con brings together over 125,000 people, who are part of a major knowledge sharing community. This community exists in person for four days a year, and online all the time. The article's author notes that this community "influences marketing strategies and budgets for movies and TV shows. It shapes the direction of new video games and helps predict strategies for future toy sales..." One wonders how this major, largely informal, data-creating, data sharing community is being used by companies for marketing, production of new products and a host of other purposes. I don't know exactly how companies currently harvest the information of communities like this - if there are spiders crawling through comic-con message boards and blogs, searching out key terms, or if they have individuals pouring over such sites. It seems to me, however, that determining an effective way to gather and synthesize this information would be a profitable tool - making the most of data sharing in the for profit realm.