Technorati's most popular blogs: Where are the new and exciting blogs?

The introduction of Techmeme's leaderboard last week engineered a lot of discussion in the blogosphere about the usefulness of such lists, and whether the new list was an improvement on Technorati's long standing top 100 most popular blogs (I even went so far as to ponder a few words myself). Thinking about these lists I decided to investigate how the Technorati popular blogs list has changed over the years, after all, if the blogosphere is a vibrant community with new exciting entrants we should see numerous changes and the emergence of innovative blogs...unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case (at least amongst the top 25 blogs).

Looking at the current top 25 blogs finds 13 of them already established in the top 100 of 28th December 2005, and of the other 12 all but three were in existence before 2006. The three 'relatively' new entrants are:
Mashable
icanhascheezburger.com
Peterandrej
...and of these only icanhascheezburger (which is without doubt the most pointless of the three) was established this year.

There could be a number of reasons for the lack of new entrants:
1)The blogosphere is dead (or at least dying), with few new and exciting entrants.
2)Blogs rarely emerge quickly, but rather take time to become established.
3)The lists are driving the traffic as much as they are reflecting the traffic.

Personally I don't think the blogosphere is dead just yet, but with the traffic being driven heavily by the relatively few 'top blog' lists a perception may be given that it is a place where only long-serving bloggers get any traffic and potential new bloggers won't be tempted to join the debate. To encourage growth and participation, maybe Technorati should include a chart of fast climbing blogs.