f l u e n c y f u m b l e

Trends at Technorati, a site tracking blog use, suggest that blogging will level off during 2007, according to a report from InformationWeek.

InformationWeek:

Less than 2% of all Internet users are frequent content contributors, while between 10% and 15% contribute occasionally and more than 50% are reading or watching what the communities are discussing.

This is not to say, of course, that merely observing the blogosphere does not constitute some kind of role in the discussion. In an October column titled “Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute,” Jakob Nielsen uses the term “lurker” to describe users who hang in the background of online communities without posting commentary. Nielsen posits that the breakdown is as follows:

90% of users are lurkers who never contribute,
9% of users contribute a little, and
1% of users account for almost all the action.

What’s the problem? An avid online lurker, I posit that contribution and participation are not to be confused in this case. Users choose not to offer up original content for a host of reasons. Perhaps the idea of publishing thoughts on the Web invades some sense of privacy, or some users find the Internet to be a passive source of entertainment, like television. Or they simply have nothing to say. The leveling-off of blogging in 2007 probably does not indicate some kind of sudden disinterest in online community as it does the passing of hype — blogging, as much as it emerged to empower citizen journalists and improve civic engagement, was quite trendy a couple of years ago. We should not be surprised to see interest plateau.

I’d wager that the blogs that are still around in a few years will be of much higher quality than the average blog today, if only for the reason that casual bloggers (the preteen demographic, namely) will have ditched the trend and glommed onto something new.

Now if only someone would go back through and wipe up all of the HTML mess they’ve left behind …