Living in the blurbs

Doug Jonstone comments on blurbs. (link from the idiosyncratic mind.) I'm intrigued by the correspondences between old-fashioned marketing and blurbs. As Doug says,

when such effusive hyperbole declares everything "brilliant", "superb" and "amazing" it all ceases to mean anything

which is more or less the problem with marketing - that is, the lack of credibility of the source. Are you going to read a book because it says "A real tour de force!" on the back, or are you going to read it because your buddy says it's pretty good? I would be a lot more likely to read a book if it was making the rounds in the blogosphere than for any other reason. So I guess book publishers are another on the list of people who need to learn to make blogs work for them. I know there are a few publisher-bloggers - wonder how effectively they use them to push books?