As Technorati surpasses 3 milion blogs ratified, Dave Sifry talks of substituting TV:
A Forrester Research report asked Internet users which activities they were spending less time doing in order to spend time at their computers. 78% of the people polled said that they gave up television viewing. A study from The Georgia Institute of Technology's Graphic, Visualization and Usability Center showed a clear shift in media habits with more than one third of respondents saying that they "use the Web instead of watching TV on a daily basis."
Similar to Tim Oren's point on cannibalization. Reminds me of an enlightened admission Doc picked up from a TV guy:
...The broadcast metrics of reach and frequency are bound for the grave. A study released this week by InsightExpress finds that people (with DVRs) are most inclined to view ads they have not seen before, and consequently are most likely to zap ads they've already seen. Joe Mandese of MediaDailyNews wrote, "it suggests that the economics of a business based on serving redundant commercial impressions to a mass audience in order to reach an impressionable few will no longer work in the future."..
With Technorati's new Ad Mission, you have to wonder if Cosmos' substitute Reach and Authority replaces Frequency. A shift from Sarnoff's Law to Reed's Law of group forming. Jeff Jarvis talks of the need for auditable metrics like CPM for blogs all the time. But perhaps different metrics are called for with a different process of ratification.
Related: Wikipedia surpasses 300,000 articles.