Almost 30 million blogs on the web

There is no paucity of blogs. Technorati, the search engine that tracks the blogosphere, counts 28.7 million blogs on the Web. But there are indicators the numbers are peaking: The Gallup poll said "the growth in the number of U.S. blog readers was somewhere between nil and negative" during 2005.

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.