Energy industry folks know of a concept of "Hubbert's Peak" or "Peak Oil," the "point in time when the maximum rate of global petroleum production is reached, after which the rate of production enters its terminal decline."
I wonder if there is an equivalent in the blogging world, which I'll call "Scoble's Peak."
Robert Scoble, at least in my mind, is one of blogging's godfathers (and I recommend his book, Naked Conversations
Recently, though, Scoble has had at least 2 posts explaining why he is blogging less (one of them is similar to my "go where they are" post-I'm honored) .
Scoble's attitude then may be the signal (possibly) of the blog creation/development/utilization high watermark.
I don't think it means blogs are losing their value, but it may mean that the massive growth is over and now, and now the next phase of competition begins (think early days of car industry).
Just checked Sifry's State of the Blogosphere, and since 'lies, damn lies, and statistics' can be used to my advantage to pluck a quote, I'll choose this one to augment my position :-)
Since our last State of the Blogosphere report in October 2006, we’ve seen a slowing in the doubling of the size of the blogosphere...
We also see a slowing in growth in the rate of posts created per day; while there are spikes in blog posts during times of significant world crisis -- for instance, last summer's conflict between Israel and Hezbollah -- the overall trend is that posting volume is growing more slowly,
So, is Scoble the bellwether for the next phase in blog evolution?
