Steve Rubel's Micro Persuasion blog http://www.micropersuasion.com/2005/10/edelman_48_of_b.html reported on Edelman PR's study of 800+ bloggers. Rubel felt that the most interesting stat was that 48% of the bloggers had no interaction with the PR community. For me it was the affirmation of using the blogosphere to assert one's authority.
70% said they wanted to receive freebies from companies with a view to blogging about them, when asked to score from 1 (no trust) to 10 if bloggers trusted material from PR companies the score was 4.6 while bloggers scored 5.5 when asked about the degree to which they trusted material from companies themselves.
139 respondents said they trusted content by an individual's blog over a company's blog. As I expected, 62% said they trusted other bloggers more than what a company said about itself - proof that the ticket to the reputation game is still third-party endorsement. https://extranet.edelman.com/bloggerstudy/. Reputation managers who don't read this study needn't bother going to work.