The Wall Street Journal had an interesting article yesterday on the uptake of blogging, and a couple of telling statistics: 32 million people now read blogs edited by 8 million bloggers.  Riva Richmond's insightful article was very discussed in the blogsphere, with some folks hailing this as great news, with others being a bit more skeptical on the above figures, which are from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Among the skeptics, I enjoyed reading Michelle Malkin's blog post, which raises a lot of valid issues, such as the difference between visitors and hits (one visitor can be responsible for several hits), crossover traffic between blogs, and the validity or relevance of some traffic measures. 

For instance, Alexa.com (an Amazon company) is a site that is often used to measure blog traffic, but are based on surfing patterns of the small subset of internet users who use Alexa's browser add-on. Some Internet savvy users might be averse to Alexa's toolbar, which has been deemed to be spyware by Symantec.

Sitemeter, which I use for Technology Futurist, is pretty reliable, and widely popular, due to its ease of use and comprehensive set of features, many of which are available free of charge.  However, Sitemeter only gives a lower bound on the actual traffic to a blog, the reason being that it only counts actual visits to the web pages, without keeping track of RSS feeds.  Many users can read entire blogs without actually having to navigate to the particular blog web site.  Alexa also fails to capture this RSS traffic.

Regardless of how accurately the actual blog traffic can be captured, the fact is that blogs are increasingly becoming part of the mainstream, so don't be surprised to see your colleagues blogging as well.  This is why companies such as Microsoft are investing resources in this area.