My opinion on some of the issues brought up around here remain the same as they have been for a year or more.
As far as the term mainstream - my personal definition is something I can talk about at the diner down the street here in my lovely town of 1,800 out in the middle of the cornfields without getting the prayer group activated to save my soul (again
).
The term itself has been around forever. In the early days of Rolling Stone magazine, for example, they went out of their way to avoid being labeled "mainstream." They stayed away from/out of the mainstream, too, as long as they generated more revenue by staying out of it (or at least pretending to stay out of it) than by plunging in.
As far as blogs go - AOL did in fact pay 21 million for ninety blogs. That leaves, by my estimate, two hundred forty-nine million nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ten blogs that are still out there, most of them with the same 15-45 days worth of updates made between the time the owner caught on to the fad and when they fizzled out.