Can blogging ever become mainstream?

I wonder if anyone has done a study on the profile of visitors that blogs typically attract. One suspects, that a large percentage of visitors are bloggers themselves. Blogs, I think, needs to take a leap ahead and become a medium that people visit the way they do Yahoo or even a Google.

The only way that can happen is by having more and more credible voices in the blogosphere, such as CEOs, world leaders, politicians, academicians etc. When celebrity blogging takes off, I can forsee a day when advertisers would pay a blogger to have them featured or 'plugged' on a blog page.

Another way in which blogs can become mainstream, is when there is a centralized rating agency. I know this goes against the very tenets of blogging, which is all about being a free-for-all medium of expression, but I would certainly like to spend time on a blog whose quality of content has been rated. Thus, there would be two types of blogs out there:

• Rated blogs: "Content here has been rated 5-stars! If you want a credible analysis of the situation in Israel, come here!"
• Free-for-all: "All views here are my own... take them seriously at your own peril. Sometimes, I will talk about my showering experience this morning."

Over time, rated blogs could become self-sustainable ventures and blogging may even become a profession that would be paid for by advertising. For this to happen, Google Ad Sense would need to find the next big thing after text ads, for text ads really dont seem to work much!

The third way, is for blogs to be used as a medium of conversation, rather than communication. The comments feature in blogs seem to have this potential, but I somehow find it to be rather cumbersome. A live chat with your readers would be more like it!

The day I see the first TV ad for a blog, will be the day I believe that blogs have truly arrived! And I do hope that that day comes soon.

[To a large extent, the views presented above are India-centric. Outside India, blogs are certainly much more "mainstream". ]