A lot of interesting things are revealed in the report, as per usual. The report is broken down into five sections, plus an introduction, that go into information like the demographics of the blogosphere, what people's motivations for blogging are, how people are making money with it, and how it's being used for marketing.
A lot of it is pretty interesting, and I'm pretty sure I'll be checking back in once I read more of their findings with regard to the financial aspects of blogging, but what particularly piqued my interest today was the aspect of the report concerning the changing nature and format of blogs.
They start with the Wikipedia's definition of a blog as a site maintained by an individual or team that presents media of varying types in reverse-chronological order, and the blogosphere as the collective community of all blogs. In terms of the changing face of the blogosphere, they say:
But as the Blogosphere grows in size and influence, the lines between what is a blog and what is a mainstream media site become less clear. Larger blogs are taking on more characteristics of mainstream sites and mainstream sites are incorporating styles and formats from the Blogosphere. In fact, 95% of the top 100 US newspapers have reporter blogs.
This has been an ongoing topic here at Mashable as well as other blogs that occasionally turn their gaze navel-ward, and one Sean and I talked about on a recent episode of Mashable Conversations. As Inquisitr's Duncan Riley made note of a couple of weeks ago, a trend gaining momentum these days is for what have been traditionally blog-style websites moving more towards a format typically called the magazine (and as Duncan says in reference to Mashable, the half-magazine) format.
Theoretically, this topic will get more exploration in tomorrow's Technorati report release ("the what's and why's of blogging"), but we're moving toward a destination where the only commonality that news portals might have in common with what's typically thought of as a blog will be their RSS feed (and even that's starting to come into question by some).
