What will 2007 hold for bloggers?

My blog is a niche blog or theme specific. It focuses on writing: authors, literary agents, novels, etc with a little smattering of my personal observations and opinions tossed in (ok, a lot). However, I’m still a blogger and the vast world of the blogosphere is where I keep my little corner of writing happiness.

I want blog traffic and I want readers. I know you’ve heard me say it before, all bloggers want traffic and readers. The motives may differ and the amount that will satisfy us may differ – but we all want the same thing. Successful bloggers have a pretty good history of content under their belt and while they were building their content, they were learning.

You don’t want to move into a new town without knowing at least something about it, right? The same theory applies with the blogosphere. While I remain in my blog niche, that doesn’t mean I’m not checking out dozens of other blogs that exist within other niches and trying to learn all I can.

Problogger is an excellent spring board for bloggers. On Problogger I found link to Andrew Wee. I’ve found vast amounts of information in both locations. Today Andrew made a post on blog predictions of 2007. He's started the Blogging Predictions 2007 Meme and tagged 20 people to post their own thoughts of what will happen in 2007.

One of the big trend forecasts going around right now for bloggers is that 2007 will see a peak and then a decline in blogging. Some are predicting the “death of bloggers”. Gartner Media Relations said in report:

Blogging and community contributors will peak in the first half of 2007. Given the trend in the average life span of a blogger and the current growth rate of blogs, there are already more than 200 million ex-bloggers. Consequently, the peak number of bloggers will be around 100 million at some point in the first half of 2007.

I wonder what Gartner has determined as the average life span of bloggers?

In November, Technorati reported that the blogosphere was doubling itself every 230 days and nearly 100,000 new blogs were created each day. At that time Technorati was tracking around 57 million blogs.

Blogging is subjective on many levels and it’s incredibly difficult to pin down what’s going to happen. I do not think that 2007 will bring the death of blogging. I do, however, think we’ll see some branching off. Corporations will continue to become more involved in the blogosphere. I believe this will change the tone and structure of those corporation websites and some blogs. I believe that many of the new bloggers of 2006 will have gained experience and we’ll continue to see more involved and sophisticated blogs from the home user that are more theme specific.

Advertising and blog income tools will continue to flourish. I agree with many other predictions that RSS or feeds will become more prevalent. RSS will become less “complicated” to understand and tools will continue to be developed to help the growth and development of syndication.

Memes have their place, but I think they will begin to taper off in popularity simply because of the saturation of content that is currently focused on memes. Not that they don’t have their place and not that they won’t continue – I just think we’ll start to see a decline in reader preference toward the meme.

I believe that in 2007 it will be more important for blogs to have some kind of theme or specification. The competition for market share of readers is tight; supply and demand takes on a whole new meaning when you apply it to the blogosphere. Those blogs that are relatively new and not niche specific are going to have a hard time generating and keeping traffic. It will require time and patience for new blogs to be in a position to compete with the big blogs (even more so than now). It is in this area where I feel blogging may see the decrease.

I imagine by June we’ll be seeing a lot of dead blogs: those blogs that started in winter of 06 or January of 07 but the blogger lost interest because they didn’t see hits after a month or two. That, or the blogger realized it would take more time and energy than they were willing to share.

In all, I think 2007 will be a good year to observe the blogosphere and see what will stay strong and what will taper off.