So soon? A media research firm is now predicting that the number of blogs will peak in the coming year as the phenomenon cools off. The British firm Gartner bases its prediction on the decline of blogs on stats showing that some 200 million people worldwide who had started blogs have already given them up.

The pace at which people stop blogging will soon overtake the pace of creation of new blogs, the company forecasts. All of which doesn't mean that blogs will go away--though they will surely evolve into something else in the coming years--but rather that the initial rush of folks who are blogging just because everyone else is will end. And that's a good thing--surely we suffer simultaneously from a surfeit of data and a paucity of wisdom.

Blogs have the feel of an interim form. They're new and easy to experiment with. The form is not encumbered by nearly as many rules and traditions as hem in other kinds of writing. But it is a second-order form, given mainly to commentary and rants and suggestions more than to original reporting, imagination or ideas. The trick for the next phase of its evolution will be to find ways to add heft and win wider notice, perhaps even some permanance for the best work, just as the best work appearing in daily newspapers and magazines eventually found its way to books (think Dickens, Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson).

Any new form meets its greatest test in the period after the fad dies. If next year is that proving time for blogs, what will the next incarnation of the blog look like?