Blogging: Subculture or mainstream?

Yes,
blogging about blogging can be the ultimate navel-gazing, but hear me out; I
mean to intrigue.

In
a well-written book on cyberculture theory, Pramod K. Nayar claims that blogs
"have become a folk cultural form." So far so good. But most of Nayar's other
descriptions of blogging seem a bit dated: it's life-writing or autobiography,
it's an online diary, it's inherently personal, it's subcultural. All this may
have been true once, but most of the blogs I read have grown up and taken on
new form and function.

Nayar
grants that "blogs are perhaps no longer subcultural considering their
heterogeneity, numbers, and expanding use on the World Wide Web." But he
doesn't elaborate on developments such as