Blogging said to peak next year

The BBC is reporting that Gardner has made a prediction about blogging and other technical areas of interest.

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."

That's something of broad prediction.  I might disagree since I think blogging tools will continue to get easier.  I think there are a lot of people who have tried blogging and stopped.  The same thing could be said about exercise bikes, but that doesn't stop new people from trying them.  For some of the new people it really works.

Just because someone doesn't update their blog everyday doesn't mean that their blog is dead.  You could easily have a family where it only gets updated once or twice a year.

Still I don't think blogging is a fad.  The kinds of useful information and filtering that you can find in a blog is just too valuable to disappear.  I think there will a realization that business blogging is very important, but that it will likely require dedicated, paid bloggers.

Will blogs such as mine disappear.  I don't think so.  There are many of us who enjoying writing and getting feedback from readers.  As I wrote in one of my other blogs, what we write is "Glue for the modern world."  We fill in the cracks between sometimes unconnected information.

I am looking forward to the evolution of blogging.  While writing for free isn't for everyone, it suits some of us very well.

The report also had predictions that Vista will be the last version of Windows and that the total cost of ownership on PCs will halve by 2010.