Less Distinction Between Blogs and Mainstream Media

In his New Rules Communications, Tom Foremski looks at Technorati CEO David Sifry’s latest quarterly report on the state of the blogosphere.

The report shows the number of blogs or posts per second — 1.4 blogs and 17 blog posts created per second. But consider the distinction between blogs and mainstream media:

…information not shown in our data but revealed in our own user testing in Q1 2007 indicates that the audience is less and less likely to distinguish a blog from, say, nytimes.com — for a growing base of users, these are all sites for news, information, entertainment, gossip, etc. and not a “blog” or a “MSM site”.

Link to Sifry’s Alerts: The State of the Live Web, April 2007

Two things:

• If you take a look at the top “blogs” they are all written by media professionals, so do they qualify as blogs? I use a blogging platform to publish, but I don’t think of myself as a blogger–I am a professional journalist.
• Mr Sifry points out that users distinguish less between mainstream media and blogs–then why is Technorati still making this distinction? It’s all mediasphere…

Tom’s New Rules Communication sponsor http://blog.cohnwolfe.com/boomerang/