Last week, I noted the reported "insignificance" of blogging. Today, Seth points to Nick Denton's Gawker stats that show roughly a million hits a day.
My question is, what is it about this change in people's reading habits that confuses pundits so deeply? We'd seen signs that fissures were appearing in TV/newspaper information-seeking behavior for years. Blogs came along at an opportune time (the taxonomy of the blogosphere makes it tempting to speak of all blogs as inhabitants of the same space, but this is specious; TrueTalk is no Gawker, has no desire to be, nor ever will be) and crystallized that behavior through a demand-side model. The point now is to watch the development of a "hit-based" and "long-tail based" universe in which big and small thrive according to their own definitions of success.
Significance is in the eye of the beholder.
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