At two separate events over the past week I expressed that blogging may be peaking. Now before you run to the phone booth to call your editor, I don't mean that it has peaked in influence. Hardly. But if you read the tea leaves behind some key statistics, the intensity of blogging may be plateauing.
Let's start with the last State of the Blogosphere report from Technorati. FIrst, the good news. The number of blogs jumped to 57M. That chart still looks like a hockey stick. However, the more critical bellweather of blogging's vitality - daily posts per day - looks like it may be cresting. We still need more data to be sure.
OK now that's just one metric. Let's look at another: the relative traffic of blogging platforms compared to other places where people can express themselves. If you take a look at the chart below you'll note that TypePad's traffic has flattened. Blogger's continues to grow but not as quickly as it once did. Meanwhile Wikipedia and YouTube traffic continues to skyrocket. Despite all of the caveats about Alexa's data, I still feel it's good for comparing sites to each other. It's a great way to say , Gorilla A vs. Gorilla B - who's bigger.
Now let's look at searches for the word blog on Google? This is perhaps the most interesting data point and it seems to fly in the face of the others. Interest in blogs - at least the singular version of the word - is continuing to climb as are media references. However if you take a close look at the chart, searches seems to be flattening while news citations are climbing. They doubled over the past year.
So what does this all mean? To me it says that we might be at the point where every individual who wants to publish a blog actively may already have one. However, press citations continue to climb. So blogs continue to remain extremely influential. There are countless anecdotal examples over the past several years that demonstrate blogging's impact in shaping how the media covers news.
Further, traffic and participation on video sharing sites continues to rise sharply. So, while blog volume may be peaking (I underscore that we still need more data), online expression is evergreen. The center of gravity will always shift as technology gives us new powers we didn't have before and new communities pop up. Regardless, brands will need to participate in this world in order to stay in the spotlight and remain trusted. The channels, however, may change with the times.
