Gartner Predicts the Blogosphere’s Future

Because of that, the Gartner report noted, the total number of bloggers will peak around 100 million in the first half of 2007.

Gartner also noted that traffic at MySpace and Facebook — two kingpins of the Web’s social-networking movement — dropped 4 percent and 12 percent respectively. Those numbers were based on figures from tracking firm Nielson//NetRatings.

“Today’s overexuberance will give way to a steady state of at least 30 million active bloggers and 30 million frequent community contributors worldwide,” wrote Gartner analysts Ed Thompson, Adam Sarner, and Esteban Kolsky. “The steady state will grow again, but much more slowly, as the global Internet population rises.”

Biz Blogs

But the nascent world of business blogs is growing, according to Shel Holtz, coauthor of Blogging for Business and vice president of a consulting group called crayon. “The trend is, I think, irreversible at this point,” said Holtz. “You’re having businesses that are showing some substantive results with well-thought-out, strategically planned corporate blogs.”

Holtz said he believes that more Fortune 500 CEOs might join Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz as frequent bloggers, too, and noted that even old economy masters such as McDonald’s have been bitten by the blogging bug.

Why? Because C-level leaders are losing their fear of blogs, despite the wary coverage of bloggers in the mainstream press. “A lot of business leaders, and rightly so, would say, ‘Why blog? Aren’t there more risks than there are benefits?’” said Holtz, who added that many reports about bloggers highlight the bizarre, outlandish, or downright dangerous side of the blogosphere.

But large and small alike, more and more firms have begun to look past the hype and see blogs as an efficient, effective way to spread their gospel, he said.

Shifting Sands

Holtz’s coauthor and fellow blogging expert Ted Demopoulos said that blogging, with its loose banter, off-the-cuff humor, and sometimes outrageous asides will affect the Web in more subtle ways, too. “I also see that standard corporate Web sites will become less formal,” he said, “or at least have a less formal component to them.”

Demopoulos believes that “people just don’t want to read this dry, sterile corporate and marketing speak,” when they can find more authentic, less imposing writing four or five clicks away. On his own site, for instance, he notes the most popular page is not just the homepage, but the “About Me” section written in a loose, informal tone.

How does that bode for blogs and the rest of the Web 2.0 movement, which relies on active communities of readers who not only siphon information off the Web sites they visit but contribute their own likes, loves, rants and raves? “Certainly we can’t just take a brochure and put it on the Web,” said Demopolous, noting that the old paradigm of static Web sites has changed.

“Big companies need to follow the trends,” he said. “They need to follow what their readers — their marketplace, their customers — are responding to.”