The Washington Post reports blogs might be peaking.Â
30 million blogs and counting…
By Frank Ahrens
It’s remarkable to think that technology adoption is moving so fast that Web logs — the earliest U.S. reference to “blog” that I can find was in a 2000 CNN technology report, showing its relative youth — could already be thought of as maturing. But that is a maxim of technology: As we get more accustomed to interfacing with tech, each new gizmo — be it a TiVo, an iPod or a blog — has a faster “uptake,” or acceptance into society, than what came before. For example, DVD players hit the 20 million mark in sales in one-third the time it took VCR players to reach the same penetration.
Part of the blog drag could be a function of age — bloggers and blog readers came of age with the Internet, and there are only so many young people out there. A recent Pew Internet & American Life Project study showed that 19 percent of teenagers and 20 percent of young adults are likely to start a blog — the highest numbers of any age group. Only 9 percent of Gen-Xers are likely to start blogs, the same percentage as 51-to-59-year-olds.
