Blogging: It's All Downhill From Here?

So here was another bloggy story reported in BBC News yesterday:

"Blogging 'set to peak next year.'"

"The blogging phenomenon is set to peak in 2007, according to technology predictions by analysts Gartner.

The analysts said that during the middle of next year the number of blogs will level out at about 100 million.

The firm has said that 200 million people have already stopped writing their blogs."

The story (which is pretty short) goes on to say:

"Gartner analyst Daryl Plummer said the reason for the levelling off in blogging was due to the fact that most people who would ever start a web blog had already done so.

He said those who loved blogging were committed to keeping it up, while others had become bored and moved on."

In a followup story today, "Blogging Headed for the Slow Lane, Suggests Report,"TechNewsWorld (link via Digg) looks to blog search and tracking site Technorati's last State of the Blogosphere report for corroborating evidence. There's been a slowdown in the rate of growth of blogs (including a decline in the number of spam blogs, which is a good thing), though more importantly, posting volume has leveled off.

Why the slowing of blog creation and posting? Growth to date has been pretty phenomenal -- at various points over the past year or so, there were different numbers -- a new blog created every minute, a new post every second, etc.

Here's one angle: looking at people's motivations:

"The number of people who thought they could just start blogging and suddenly become rich and famous as a result has peaked, because that's not how it works," B.L. Ochman, avid blogger and president of WhatsNextOnline, told TechNewsWorld. "But the blog as a form of communication is here to stay."

I think there's some truth in there. Without the people, a blog is just a funny looking Web site.

The article then goes on to quibble about definitions -- if I start a blog,
post a few times, then abandon it after 10 days, was I ever a blogger? That bit, I think, starts to miss the point.

Blogging is just a tool for communication. It's kind of like driving -- everybody drives, but not that many of us are full-time drivers. We drive when we need to get where we're going.

Or think of it another way -- maybe you don't have a full-on blog. But if you just share photos online, and the newest ones show up first, and those photos have captions and descriptions, and visitors can leave comments on the photos, and there's archives, search and even a feed.

That photo service is starting to look an awful lot like a blog.

And what about people who consume blogs, boards and other social media? Maybe they comment, or maybe they just lurk. Either way, they're still participating.

Maybe in the future, a blogger will be a person who blogs full time, all the time, and everybody else will just be kind of "bloggy."

At the very basic, individual level, it really doesn't matter that much how many total bloggers there are. All that matters is that you have enough folks to talk to in your immediate sphere of influence.

(Well, I guess on the macro level, there also has to be enough interest, attention and money in social media to sustain the companies that make all the services that people use.)

Anyway, just some parting thoughts for a Friday. Happy Hanukkah, too. -- Joe

Tags: blogging, blogging motivations, social media, bloggy