Gartner: Blogging to peak in 2007
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Could blogging be near the peak of its popularity? The technology gurus at Gartner Inc. believe so. One of the research company's top 10 predictions for 2007 is that the number of bloggers will level off in the first half of next year at roughly 100 million worldwide.
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The metrics firm tracks growth of social networks, blogs and blogging sites, and video-sharing sites from August 2006 to August 2007.
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A British tech analyst is predicting that the worldwide blogging phenomenon will level off next year at about 100 million individual Web logs.
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Start-ups came back in style. IPO fever gripped Silicon Valley. Blogging went mainstream. 2004 was a year of dubious distinctions along with steady innovation and successes. -The Washington Post
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NEW YORK - &quot;Blog&quot; is now the most popular search word in the online version of the Merriam-Webster dictionary. Its frequent lookup paralleled its growth on the political scene this year as keepers of Web logs
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In March 2002, I made a bet with Martin Nisenholtz about the relative importance of weblogs and the New York Times. I was and am a blogger, and Martin worked then, as he does now, for the Times. For the actual terms of the bet, read the piece on the LongNow site, and a story I wrote to announce the bet. A few comments.  1. It seems now is the time to decide who won the bet, if either of us did. 2. The world that I hoped would come about did not. While blogs have broken many stories, they have not, in general, turned into the authoritative sources I hoped they would in 2002. When the blogosphere resembles journalism it's often the tabloid kind.  3. I wouldn't mind losing the bet. That is, I wouldn't mind if the Times fully embraced the web, and I suspect Martin wouldn't mind if blogs rose to the quality of the Times. 4. If the bet had been held a year later, it seems there would be a pretty good chance that Martin would have won the bet because they recently took down the firewall at the Times, allowing search engines to index the full content. In the past, articles would remain visible for a couple of weeks then you'd have to pay money to access them. I believe they have a special deal with Google and other crawlers that allow them to get past the membership wall. For most of 2007 the Times articles were behind the firewall, and were less likely to be pointed to (which is how they rise in rank at Google). 5. It certainly is fun to speculate, but the decision about who won belongs exclusively to the Long Now Foundation. They have to decide who determines what the top stories of 2007 are, and imho they should consult with search experts to determine how to do the queries. Apparently it makes a difference how you do it.  But ultimately it's their decision. 6. Whether Wikipedia has more or less results seems to be a sidebar to the bet, which only talks about blogs and the Times. 7. Another interesting sidebar is rich media. In 2002, before podcasting had taken hold, before YouTube existed, it would have been hard to forsee the story of the South Carolina beauty queen, or the Don't Tase Me Bro guy. Questions about the future are always framed in the context of the past. Did the question Martin and I asked have any value in 2007, or did it just say something about the world of 2002?   Update: Paul Boutin who arranged the bet, apparently in conjunction with Google (I didn't know this) in 2002, weighs in.
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Networking technology turned out to be one of the more interesting stories in 2007. Jon Oltsik offers a look ahead to the new year.
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Blog: The company says it needs the cash to fuel growth, but some bloggers think the problem is not enough subscribers.
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Last year proved big for blogs and bloggers, according to data released from The Pew Internet & American Life Project. Blog readership jumped 58 percent between February and November, and comprised 32 million U.S. citizens in 2004. More than 8 million U.S. citizens have created a Web-based diary, and one in 10, or around 14 million U.S. Internet users, has contributed thoughts or comments to a blog.
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Interesting data  this morning (thanks Dan ) on weblogs:  "Blog readership shoots up 58% in 2004 6 million Americans get news and information fed to them through RSS aggregators But 62% of online Americans do not know what a blog is"  Read the PDF  for more stats (man I hate PDF).  "27% of internet users say they read blogs, a 58% jump from the 17% who told us they were blog readers in February. This means that by the end of 2004 32 million Americans were blog readers. Much of the attention to blogs focused on those that covered the recent political campaign and the media. And at least some of the overall growth in blog readership is attributable to political blogs. Some 9% of internet users ...
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Over on the Rojo blog  Chris writes:  "Thanks very much to Steve Gillmor for alerting us to a bug in how we, and other aggregators, were parsing New York Times RSS feeds. In short, stories older than 7 days or so were linking to abstracts of the articles, not the full articles themselves. This is something we will fix. Steve speculated that perhaps the "Times doesn't want server-based aggregators such as Bloglines and Rojo to consistently allow permalink access beyond seven days." Fortunately we don't see any evidence of that and in fact believe NYT has done a great job in making their content available via RSS, particularly by including a specific "partner" parameter on the URL for RSS aggr ...
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As long as I've been involved in the tech industry there's been the concept of The Year of X, where X has been artificial intelligence, personal information managers, local area networks, CD-ROMs, P2P. Proclaimed by tech pubs, most likely to help their ad sales reps sell space, they focused the attention on areas the industry was investing money, in hopes of being there when lightning strikes, when wealth is created, as it often is in the tech industry. Sometimes the "year of" prognostications are right, more often they're wrong.  In that sense, there's no doubt that 2007 is the year of the social network in Silicon Valley. This may not be the year when huge wealth is created, but I don't doubt that the area is fertile, and I don't say that lightly, because I'm often a contrarian when it comes to self-induced Silicon Valley euphoria. There are a couple of ideas I've been getting ready to write about, I'm not quite ready yet, but here they are anyway. 1. When people get together to discuss Twitter, and perhaps other social networks (and Twitter is that, a bare-bones social network), they often discuss as if there were a common user experience, but this is a misperception, there are many different experiences, they may group into large subsets of the users, and they may not. Some food for thought. On Twitter I try to keep a ten percent ratio of people I follow over people who follow me. For other people, maybe most, the ratio is 1-to-1, they follow approximately the same number of people as follow them. Scoble follows thousands of people. For him Twitter is like a very fast chatroom. For me it's like weblogs.com on a busy day in 2002. I've seen people who follow 0 people, for them Twitter is a publishing environment. Very different experiences. To each of them Twitter is a different product. Note that when reporters cover Twitter, before they've become users, they probably write about the home page at Twitter, where complete strangers report on the kind of spaghetti sauce they like. That may be why so many articles dismiss Twitter as useless.  2. Integration is so tempting, but elusive. The other day a friend on Twitter wrote about a movie he liked. I looked it up on the NY Times movie review site (a newly revealed location now that their archive is open and a very valuable one, another topic I plan to cover, the wealth of the NY Times archive). I would have then liked to have clicked over to Netflix to order it. And even better, I'd have liked to have looked at what other movies he likes. Now we're very close to having this, we just need a way to co-relate two identity systems, Twitter's and Netflix's. And think of the value in integrating Amazon with Twitter. The mind explodes at the possibilities. This is what I meant when I said earlier "they&#185;re not trivial problems, they&#185;ve been there since the Internet outgrew academia and started being used for commercial purposes." This issue is now coming to a head, as the users can see the next step clearly. How to integrate the systems is known technology, but it's not a solved problem economically and politically. We need to get clear on the opportunities, and feel free to dream when the barriers between the networks come down.
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Nearly one-fourth of companies surveyed by ChangeWave Research are now using Web 2.0-social networking software in some form, and another 8 percent intend to do so within the next year.The study is the organization&#39;s first stab at tracking Web 2.0 in the enterprise, said Joshua Levine, editor of ChangeWave Investing, an advisory service from the Rockville, Maryland, firm.&quot;I think Web 2.0 has been simmering a lot for the last couple of years under the radar, at least in enterprises; 2008 looked as we were coming toward it that this stuff would be exploding,&quot; Levine said.Overall, 39 percent of respondents said their firms are very or somewhat willing to use social software. In addition, among respondents whose organizations are already using such software, 35 percent said spending on it will rise in the next 90 days and just two percent said it will fall.Twenty-six percent of companies currently using social software said they plan to invest most heavily in wikis, followed by blogs (15 percent), social networks (13 percent), mashups (5 percent), RSS feeds (5 percent) and collaborative tagging (3 percent).However, the trends were somewhat different among future Web 2.0 users. They said their companies intended to spend the most money on social networks and blogs, which scored 22 percent and 21 percent, respectively.While 79 percent of current Web 2.0 software users said it is being used to improve internal communication and collaboration, only 48 percent of future users said the same. Future users were more focused on external goals, such as better customer service, greater brand awareness and increased sales.&quot;That&#39;s something we really want to drill into next time, why that is,&quot; Levine said. The company plans to repeat the survey, possibly by as soon as midyear.ChangeWave&#39;s report also tracked which vendors are benefiting from the Web 2.0 trend. Microsoft ranked highest in each of the six software categories, followed by IBM in a number of categories.However, open-source and in-house-developed software both showed strength. Some 31 percent of respondents whose companies are using or will begin using wikis within the next year are doing so with open-source technology, and 28 percent of those using mashups developed them in-house, according to the study.ChangeWave surveyed 2,081 people in September.
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Could blogging be near the peak of its popularity? The technology gurus at Gartner Inc. believe so.
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Vox populi, 2004 style. Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) on Wednesday said it will offer blogging to the online many-headed.
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I&#8217;m playing the devil&#8217;s advocate here, so keep that in mind in case I end up trampling all over anything you hold dear :) Google has taken a lot of flak on a lot of issues in the past few years - it&#8217;s a price an industry leader invariably has to pay.  Apart from Blogger spam [...]
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The alternative search engine buys Bloglines in a move to compete with the likes of Google and Yahoo. Also: Mitsubishi feels the financial pain of repeated scandals.... EarthLink earnings are up and looking good... and more.