During the past week, Technorati has published a series of articles on the state of the blogosphere in 2008, the first such report in nearly 18 months.

Like previous reports from Technorati, this latest one goes beyond just the raw numbers. It also includes brief interviews with some bloggers about the role of blogging in their lives, the tools, time, and resources used to produce their blogs, and how blogging has impacted them personally, professionally, and financially.

I talked about the report in FIR #383 on Thursday, an overview summary of its content published to that day (and I’ve now put together an Agglom web slideshow of all the report’s content, making it easy to navigate the report’s sections).

Whatever you might think of Technorati these days, an analysis of the blogosphere such as this carries a lot of weight and credibility.

From a communicator’s point of view, it contains valuable information about blogs and bloggers – highly useful data when planning any kind of social media outreach programme, or simply understanding the global depth and breadth of this parallel/complementary communication and connection system.

The report, a snapshot of what things looked like in mid-2008, provides some clues to the likely evolution of blogging in the next few years.

Of all the quotes from the bloggers Technorati interviewed, this one from Michael Arrington best sums up for me what’s happening:

[…] perhaps the most interesting development is the steady evolution in the definition of a blog itself. Today photo and video blogs are already common. Microblogging platforms like Twitter and Friendfeed are the fast food equivalent of the blogging world, and continue to gain popularity because they let people update multiple times per day with 140 characters or less on what they are doing, how they’re feeling, etc. Not only is microblogging a terrific method of self expression, the value of the raw data that’s created is enormously important.

(Read the Wikipedia definition of a blog.)

Elsewhere, plenty has already been written about Technorati’s report, providing a rich mine of diverse commentary and opinion about blogs, blogging and where it all might be heading.

And where it all might be heading is probably the most interesting thought.