BL Ochman is starting a project to track “how long it takes the New York Times to pick up stories from the Blogosphere.” She cites cases of bloggers getting fired for their personal blogs taking five months to hit the press, and today’s article mentioning Electronic Frontier Foundation’s much criticized recommendation that workplace bloggers should blog anonymously taking ten days.

I personally wonder when we’ll now see mainstream media stories about “how Yahoo got its mojo back” after Om Malik and others (myself included) blogged about it a few weeks ago. Yahoo’s impressive earnings today might be the catalyst.

So what does this lagtime between the mainstream media and blog media mean for the startup world? Yes, companies that are ahead of the trends (both competitive and market forces) have the ability to make preemptive moves – that will always be the case. But there are a new crop of companies, like Cymfony, which offer technology-enabled services to monitor the blogoshpere for competitive intelligence. (That company, of course, has its own blog with posts on the subject). Startups that utilize technology to monitor and search (in a structured manner) this online activity could present themselves as interesting investment opportunities.