A DigitalPoint Forums thread reports that Google has also done a backlink update recently.
Now, I think most people in this forum thread are talking about the link:www.domain.com command when searched at Google.com. That backlink command is known to just show a sampling on one's backlinks and no the full set of backlinks.
If that is the case and people are noticing a change (or increase) in the number of backlinks reported, then there is not much to those numbers. I personally would ignore such an update. What you do want to look at are your backlinks reported in Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer.
There have been additional reports of Google Blog Search not return recent backlink counts for specific URL checks. For example, an article I wrote yesterday, shows 0 backlinks in Google Blog Search, click here to see. This appears to be a small, temporary issue in Google. I suspect it will be fixed shortly.
Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.