Blogospheric Implosion?

Last night I mentioned to my wife — a reference librarian at the Library of Congress whose areas of concentration include e-commerce and information technology — that the BBC website had just run a story headlined “Blogging ‘set to peak next year.”” Here it is.

Her response to this was a sound (one I cannot quite transcribe) conveying a subtle blend of disbelief, disgust, and world-weariness. It was not at all a matter of pro-blog parti pris; rather, it reflected a deeply informed disdain for the methods and presumptions usually involved in making such predictions. As usual, I payed close attention to her opinion in the matter. (Reference librarians have amazing powers.)

Some of the rationale offered by the futurologists at Gartner, according to the BBC:

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…..

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.

“A lot of people have been in and out of this thing,” Mr Plummer said.

“Everyone thinks they have something to say, until they’re put on stage and asked to say it.”

Last month blog tracking firm Technorati reported that 100,000 new blogs were being created every day, and 1.3 million blog posts were written.

Technorati is tracking more than 57 million blogs, of which it believes around 55% are “active” and updated at least every three months.

Okay. But turning to Information Week, I read:

Dave Sifry, the author of that report, said he believed the slowdown detected by Technorati may have been due to a decrease in the number of spam blogs, or splogs. Technorati has been tracking. Either way, the rate at which the number of blogs doubles did slow in the third quarter compared to previous quarters.

In October, Sifry said that Technorati was tracking about 57 million blogs and that about 3 million new blogs were being added every month. According to Sifry’s calculations, that is about 100,000 new blogs a day, compared to about 160,000 new blogs a day in June. The blogosphere was doubling every 236 days, he said. From the second quarter of 2004 until the second quarter of 2006, the blogosphere doubled every five to seven months, he said.

“This change is primarily due to Technorati’s aggressive splog control measures,” Sifry wrote.

All of which serves as a reminder that (as the saying goes) it is very difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.

Be that as it may….I predict that word of the Gartner forecast will circulate among print-media folk next week (so far, no sign of it at Romenesko yet) with a giddy sense of vindication that could never be translated into anything like a coherent analysis of why this will stop the hemoragging already well underway.

It won’t be rational. And the notion of causality involved (if only blogs would go away, all the ad revenue would come back!) will resemble that of cargo-cult members standing on their heads.

But what the hell else is there to do? So….throw your feet in the air, wave ’em like you really do care.