The NY Times digs into the Technorati State Of The Blogosphere report, and can't help but see itself -- mainstream media -- as the biggest confirmation for the importance of the blogosphere. Self-congratulatory dummies.

[from Measuring the Blogosphere - New York Times]

Earlier this week, Technorati, a Web site that indexes blogs, released its semiannual "State of the Blogosphere" report. It records a steady, and astonishing, growth. Nearly 80,000 new blogs are created every day, and there are some 14.2 million in existence already, 55 percent of which remain active. Some 900,000 new blog postings are added every day - a steady increase marked by extraordinary spikes in new postings after incidents like the London bombing. The blogosphere - that is, the virtual realm of blogdom as a whole - doubles in size every five and a half months.

[...]

The conventional media - this very newspaper, for instance - have often discussed the growing impact of blogging on the coverage of news. Perhaps the strongest indicator of the importance of blogdom isn't those discussions themselves, but the extent to which media outlets are creating blogs - or bloglike manifestations - of their own.

Hmmm. Alternatively, you could interpret the growing adoption of blogs by mainstream media as an attempt to parrot the form factor of social media -- without actually adopting all of its core, chewy goodness -- because people are defecting, in droves. All those folks blogging are, in general, reading blogs first. And the hours they are spending in a deeply social interaction with like-minded others through blogs is time not spent reading the Daily Blatz.