Via Tim Bray I ran across David Sifry's latest post on the state of the blogosphere. The most interesting take away is what Tim highlighted - the "magic middle":

The Magic Middle is the 155,000 or so weblogs that have garnered between 20 and 1,000 inbound links. It is a realm of topical authority and significant posting and conversation within the blogosphere.

That's a much larger group of people commenting on things than you could find 15 years ago via traditional media outlets. Instead of the handful of voices on talk radio or in small publications, we now have this large (and growing) set of communities. That's a big change, IMHO.