A post by Pranam Kolari on ebiquity's blog claims that the English-speaking blogosphere has reached its peak.
This echoes predictions made by Gartner in December that the blogosphere will top out this year at 100m blogs, and start to decline thereafter.
At the time, Gartner based its prediction on the assumption that all those people who intend to experiment with a blog have already done so, and many have decided to move on to something else.
Kolari's claims are based on even shakier foundations - a study by the University of Maryland in Baltimore, which looked at occurrences of the word "I" in blog postings.
The point made by ebiquity is that the number of blog posts containing "I" has remained more or less constant over the past year, at around 400,000 per day. So this, it says, means that the English speaking blogosphere has reached its peak.
This seems a bizarre method of measurement as it fails to take into account the number of blog posts that don't contain the term. For example, the last ten posts on this blog have been written without using the word.
There is also plenty of room for growth in countries that have yet to reach full broadband penetration.
In addition, as peaks in blogging have often accompanied big news events, as Technorati's figures suggest, who is to say that there won't be an explosion in blogging activity to accompany the US Presidential elections next year?
Graham Charlton is Editor at Econsultancy. Follow him on Twitter or connect via Linkedin or Google+.
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7:41PM on 2nd March 2007
The fellow does, after all, purport to benchmark "I" posts against all posts:
BlogPulse reports that around 45% of all postings feature an “I”. Technorati indexes around 400000 posts featuring “I” per day. Merging the two data points Technorati indexes around 900000 posts per day, or rather around 40000 posts per hour, a number which has seen no change for almost a year. Nothing new here, the English blogosphere has plateaued. What’s confusing is that this analysis does not correlate with David SIfry’s number from October 2006, with around 1.3 Million postings per day, putting off my analysis by around 50%. What am I missing here?
You might critique that assumption from a methodological point of view, sure, but when you pretend that that inconvenient argument does not exist, you are arguing against a straw man.