"An online subscription to LeMonde costs €6 per month (almost US$8 or £4.13), and provides full access to the website and a number of other services, including the option to have your own blog. Half of the top 10 most popular blogs are now occupied by readers.

In France, more media properties have taken an interest in their audiences' wish to be visible online. Newspaper Le Nouvel Observateur, commercial TV channel M6, and radio channel Skyrock all have opened up their sites for weblogs from their readers, viewers, and listeners.

Skyrock launched its blogging service in January 2003 under the name Skyblogs and is the uncontested market leader: The site has more than 1 million blogs created by listeners, with an average of 35 entries per blog."

Another million I've never heard of, I wonder if Technorati has?

Traffic has risen from last year, as it has every year, and I see that other eCommerce sites are also complaining, as they do every year, but the comment spam that Six Apart are seeing is near denial of service, as they do builds whether they block the spam or not (they're fixing this bug at the moment, but older installations are thusly dangerous for other sites on the same machine as the older MT installation—update people!) In a discussion on the issue I found one possible solution that will be just a part of the arms race, but demonstrate the problem: "...and the spammers will eventually figure out what an appropriate delay before each attempt is, but it should prevent massive server loads of 10000 comments within a minute, right?"

Jay Allen who created the MT BlackList and now works for Six Apart, writes: "...solving the comment spam problem once and for all and making it a non-issue, not just for us in the Movable Type/TypePad world, but also for all weblogs regardless of publishing tool. Our preference is towards solutions that scale to the entire weblog medium..."