Stuart Henshall responded to my post about using consumers for innovation by asking if any marketers are out there using blogs as part of diaries for consumer research: "What captures the imagination -- is the idea of giving product managers a 24/7 focus group on steroids."

An interesting idea, so I'm passing it along. Anybody doing this? I have considered the idea of setting up a blog interface for our panel. The care and feeding of a panel, especially an innovation panel like ours where we've actually evaluated and screened the members for creative skills and give them ongoing creativity training, is very time-consuming and expensive. Blogging, RSS, wikis, and other kinds of social software could be a great help.

What Stuart's postulating would be pretty cutting-edge, kind of like a cross between self-reported diaries and ethnographic research. What you'd get from the panelists would blur the line between research and ideation, but imagine the potential for inventive recombinations - both on the part of the panelists and on the part of the marketer analyzing the ongoing results.