Blogging To Peak In 2007? Not A Chance.

While I am an unabashed booster of blogging, even the “fair and balanced” side of myself is agog over the latest news on blogging. Gartner, an internationally known braintrust of analysts and consultants has released a report proclaiming that Blogging will slow down in 2007. Now, to be fair, the best thing would be to actually have the article in my grubby paws, but in lieu of that, we have to go on a report courtesy of the AP.

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.

The reason: Most people who would ever dabble with Web journals already have. Those who love it are committed to keeping it up, while others have gotten bored and moved on, said Daryl Plummer, chief Gartner fellow.

I’m not sure how someone so esteemed as a Gartner fellow could be so wrong about blogging. One need not need any numbers, but only simple logic to look no further than the rest of the world to see the growth of blogging.

Even if the rate of growth were to slow down in North America, the blogosphere is exploding in places such as China and India — a country of almost a billion people, where one of the official languages is English.

In fact, as the penetration of internet access and broadband access catches up to North America and Western Europe, one cannot but fathom that like a rising tide, it will influence all manner of internet activity. Including the means to provide a voice to the potentially disenfranchised, or those whose voices may not be used to the freedom of speech.

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(Yes, that was a reference to blogging).

Clearly, I expect blogging to continue to take off through 2007 and beyond; the only issue is, will professional services like Gartner, or even Technorati, be able to make enough inroads into the Non-English speaking blogosphere to measure this kind of data accurately?

If reports like this continue to surface, I think the answer will continue to be a resounding “no”.