Gartner: Blogging to Level Off in ’07

BBC News reports on a Gartner study that predicts the number of blogs will peak at around 100 million next year.

“Most people who would ever start a web blog had already done so,” said the article, quoting Gartner analyst Daryl Plummer. This comes as many people who jumped on the blogging train over the past year get bored and move on, while a certain number of those who are serious about it will stick around and constitute the area below the plateau. Technorati meanwhile reports that about 55 percent of the 57 million blogs it tracks are active (updated at least every three months).

The staying power of blogs as popular sources of information and entertainment will have a lot of effect on companies looking to tie together the power of blogging with local search. Microsoft, for example, will continue to integrate Spaces in different ways with the social capabilities of local search products like Windows Live Local and Virtual Earth 3-D. Yahoo!’s emphasis on social media will also likely include further development and integration of its own blogging platform, Yahoo! 360 (although it has failed to gain the traction for which the company had hoped). And then there is Google, whose popular blogging platform, Blogger, came out of beta this week with new features and a new marketing push.

Blogger link now appears above blog-related search results in Google Other blog-related innovations meanwhile continue to roll out, such as Jaxtr and Outside.in, and I expect to see many more until the trailing effects of such a slowdown in net blog growth are seen (if this indeed happens next year). Either way, for the most part, blogs are here to stay. The leveling effect they have had on the media world  along with other powerful user-generated content such as online video  can’t be discounted.