The blogging "trend" could reach its peak in 2007, according to a recent Gartner prediction, USA Today reported Thursday.

The forecast came as part of a larger report of Gartner's top 10 predictions for 2007 and beyond and speculated that the number of active bloggers will level off in the first half of next year at roughly 100 million worldwide.

Blog tracking site Technorati defines an "active" blog as one that is updated once every three months, and announced that it was tracking 57 million blogs as of this October, making the " blogosphere" over 100 times larger than it was in 2003.

However, the rate of growth has begun to slow. According to Technorati, the number of tracked blogs is now only doubling once every seven-and-a-half months or so, compared to doubling every six months as it has in the recent past.

Chief Gartner fellow Daryl Plummer says that the reason for the slowing in growth and the predicted leveling off is that 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.

"A lot of people have been in and out of this thing," Plummer said. "Everyone thinks they have something to say, until they're put on stage and asked to say it." However, Plummer noted that this leveling-off dynamic plays out all the time.

There is some disagreement with this reasoning among the blogging world, some of whom argue that much of the world's population has yet to get online and have the opportunity to start (and quit) blogging.

Source: Xinhua