Growing markets encourage optimism, and lead to hype. We can all remember the dot com boom; a few years before that I recall the satisfaction of working with clients who were growing 20 per cent a year (regardless of my efforts).
This may be premature, but I’ve a hunch that weblogging may be moving beyond the ‘irrational exuberance’ phase. My (slight) evidence: visitors to this modest site dipped in May after showing strong growth in the first third of the year. There have been previous dips, but August and December are holiday times with fewer postings and fewer active readers.
There’s stronger evidence of this trend from the much more popular Micro Persuasion site. Here, strong growth in visitors also stalled in May. I couldn’t find publicly-available web stats on other PR weblogs. Can you confirm or confound my hunch?
PR Studies 
Just a thought, but I do all of my reading from my RSS reader, which means I don’t visit a blog (or site)unless I want to make a comment, like now.
So could it be that people are still reading your posts even though they are not visiting your site? Would it not be more accurate to measure your feed subscriptions?
Or have I missed the point completely?
Stephen
You make a very good point: the stats may reveal a rise in scanning of blogs via RSS, rather than a decline in blog readership.
Interesting…the first thing that popped into my head was the April BusinessWeek front cover, “Blogs will change your business”.
Maybe coverage on blogs, like this paticular one, hit a larger spike in April then it did in May. Also, maybe the coverage on blogs in mainstream press as a whole hit its high peak in April.
So in April, more people were pouncing around the internet checking out blogs and trying to figure out how ‘blogs will change their business’ and then in May they figured out that blogs cannot be controled 🙂