This interesting graph (compiled from Technorati data) comes from a BusinessWeek piece. I came to it via this meditation on the phenomenon, which says,

Perhaps we’ve realized that blogging every day isn’t as fun as it sounds. A happened-upon red swirl of autumn leaves before a backdrop of unusually artful East Vancouver graffiti may very well be a blog-worthy topic. Life’s minor muses are perhaps what inspire the pleasure blogger to pick up a keyboard in the first place, but it actually takes work to develop new material on a regular basis. No, writing never becomes easy no matter how long you do it.

Some difficult truths have been brought to light by the personal blogging blitz of the last few years. One such revelation is that most of us aren’t as interesting as we think. Waking up every day and jotting down some deep thoughts about breakfast is a difficult way to sustain any kind of readership. A creative writing teacher once told me that everyone has lived one novel-worthy story. One being the operative word, I think.

It’s as if we’ve gone through a few generations of blogging natural selection. The ones left are the big alpha bloggers, well suited to the harsh — and fickle — web environment. Said alphas have learned how to make money from their wordslinging, transforming what was once a very grassroots medium into something much more commercial. The pleasure bloggers just didn’t have the genes, nor the capitalistic instincts, to survive.

The writer goes on to speculate that the energy which originally powered the growth of blogging may simply be dissipating into other media — microblogging (like Twitter, Jaiku), social networking (FaceBook updates), etc. He also reveals that Google has acquired Jaiku, which is something I had missed. Hmmm…