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Talk of the bay

Company spread news of ID theft ring through blog

By DAVE GUSSOW
Published August 15, 2005


Press releases are yesterday's news. Even e-mail isn't fast enough anymore. So how did Clearwater's Sunbelt Software get international attention for its discovery of an identity theft ring?

It posted the information on the company Web log, or blog.

"We have a lot of people who monitor our blog, a lot of the people we deal with in the industry," said Eric Sites, Sunbelt's vice president of research and development. "It's a pretty quick way to release the information."

The information went up Aug. 4. By the next day, two tech publications, InformationWeek and ComputerWorld, had stories online. And from there, other bloggers picked up on it and the news quickly spread around the world.

In addition to blogs linking to each other, the news also got distributed through a Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, feed for those who signed up to receive Sunbelt news.

According to a comScore Networks' study, 50-million Americans viewed a blog in the first quarter of this year. Tech news was the third most popular blog topic, behind political and lifestyle categories.

[Last modified August 12, 2005, 19:46:02]


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