An interesting essay on "Blogging, the nihilist impulse" by Geert Lovink dating from March 2006 quotes the Blog Herald as the source of a recent estimate of a total of 100 million blogs worldwide. Besides their liberating potential and "counter-cultural folklore", Mr. Lovink sees blogs as part of an unfolding process of "massification" of the Internet.

The author quotes Microsoft's former in-house blogger Robert Scoble as the source of a list of five features that make blogs so hot. The first is the "ease of publishing", the second is what Mr. Scoble calls "discoverability", the third is "cross-site conversations", the fourth is permalinking (giving the entry a unique and stable URL) and the last is syndication (replication of content elsewhere).  Given this functionality, the number of blogs worldwide is clearly set to increase.