What is a blog nowadays ? A immense amount of content is now available as a stream organised along a timeline, most often with a way to interact by commenting. The blogging meme has spread and evolved, influencing the whole online medium and at the same time diluting into other forms. We now have a continuum ranging from purely discursive micro-blogging to feature length articles through link blogs, picture blogs and what we can with hindsight qualify as traditional blogging. Is a blog something that Technorati defines and indexes as a blog ? I believe that this is a moot point : the production of information streams has gone mainstream, even if the proportion of the population that is capable of articulate journalistic writing remains more or less stable. - Jean-Marc Liotier via FriendFeed MT Plugin

Technorati's site is down. Looks like *some* things don't change over time. - Sprague D

I assume that they didn't count Microblogging / Twitter? It is a lot easier to Twitter every day than to write a thought-provoking blog post. Checking blog posts every morning has replaced the morning paper for many of us already! The number of quality blogs has gone up and have worked there way into my daily routine, and that is a great thing. - Frank Sinton via FriendFeed MT Plugin

This is a great quantitative analysis. However, I think it's getting more "mainstreamed" than "niched". Case in the point: We were at Blog World Expo the other day and I was delighted to see couple of old (I mean really old!) media representatives stopping by and scouting technologies they can use on their in-the-works-social site. Works! Indus - Indus Khaitan via FriendFeed MT Plugin

@Dalka, you say: "why should we believe (and make serious decisions off of) these numbers? I don't think you've earned that trust." I think Technorati has more than earned our trust to deliver these kind of statistics. It's been measuring the blogosphere right from the start, no other analytics company can say that. @Richard Jalichandra (CEO - Technorati), you say: "Blogs are media, not a fringe web 2.0 fad." I couldn't agree more! :-) I do think it's important to make a distinction between writing blogs, which Marshall argues is on the decline, and reading them, which most agree is going mainstream. Marshall himself wrote that: "Reading blogs is becoming increasingly mainstream and the line between a blog and another kind of website is growing increasingly blurred." Looking forward to the next instalment of the Technorati data... - Richard via FriendFeed MT Plugin

I am with Frank as reading blogs is a massive part of my day now, I picked up a newspaper this morning but read through my feeds on Google Reader instead! - Joe Dawson

Started to post something, decided it won't fit in the space provided. :P - abacab