The analysts said that during the middle of next year the number of blogs will level out at about 100 million.

The firm has said that 200 million people have already stopped writing their blogs.

Gartner has made 10 predictions, including stating that Vista will be the last major release of Windows and PCs will halve in cost by 2010.

Gartner analyst Daryl Plummer said the reason for the levelling off in blogging was due to the fact that most people who would ever start a web blog had already done so.

He said those who loved blogging were committed to keeping it up, while others had become bored and moved on.

"A lot of people have been in and out of this thing," Mr Plummer said.

"Everyone thinks they have something to say, until they're put on stage and asked to say it."

Last month blog tracking firm Technorati reported that 100,000 new blogs were being created every day, and 1.3 million blog posts were written.

Technorati is tracking more than 57 million blogs, of which it believes around 55% are "active" and updated at least every three months.

Gartner also predicted that:

# By 2010, the average total cost of ownership of new PCs will fall by 50%

# By 2010, 60% of the worldwide cellular population will be "trackable" via an emerging "follow-me internet"

# By the end of 2007, 75% of enterprises will be infected with undetected, financially motivated, targeted malware that evaded their traditional perimeter and host defences

Department of Corrections spokeswoman Gretl Plessinger said she doesn't believe Diaz felt any pain. She said Diaz started snoring and became unconscious after the first three drugs were administered and never regained consciousness.

Plessinger said Diaz had liver disease, which required the second dose of lethal chemicals. But Diaz's cousin Maria Otero said the family had no knowledge that he suffered from liver disease and said the execution was political.

"Who came down to Earth and gave you the right to kill somebody?" Otero said, referring to Gov. Jeb Bush. "Why a stupid second dose?"

Bush said in a statement that the Department of Corrections followed all protocols: "A preexisting medical condition of the inmate was the reason tonight's procedure took longer than recent procedures carried out this year," the statement said.

Diaz was pronounced dead at 6:36 p.m., despite his protests of innocence and requests for clemency made by the governor of his native Puerto Rico.

A spokesman for Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, called Diaz's death a botched execution.

"They had to execute him twice," Mark Elliot said. "If Floridians could witness the pain and the agony of the executed man's family, they would end the death penalty."

In most Florida executions, the prisoner loses consciousness almost immediately and stops moving within three-to-five minutes. Two doctors watching a heart monitor then wait for it to show a flat line. They then inspect the body and pronounce death. The whole process happens within 15 minutes.

Diaz's final appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court challenged the chemicals used in the state's procedure, saying it constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. His appeals were rejected about an hour before his execution began.

Attorneys for him and other condemned inmates have been unsuccessfully challenging Florida's three-chemical method, saying it results in extreme pain that an inmate cannot express because one of the drugs is a paralyzing agent.

Puerto Rican officials, including Gov. Acevedo Vila and Senate President Kenneth D. McClintock, wrote Bush asking him to stop Diaz's execution, but he declined. Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, abolished capital punishment in 1929.

Moments before his execution, Diaz again denied killing Joseph Nagy during a robbery at the Velvet Swing Lounge. There were no eyewitnesses to Nagy's Dec. 29, 1979, murder. Most of the club's employees and patrons were locked in a restroom, but Diaz's girlfriend later told police he was involved.

As he was led out of a Manhattan police station, Karsan said Ono was trying "to stop me from pursuing a sexual harassment case."

Ono's spokesman denied it.

"That is completely false. She's the victim here," the spokesman, Elliott Mintz, told the New York Post.

The security staff for Ono, the widow of John Lennon, told detectives that Karsan wrote in a rambling note to her that he had secretly photographed her and made audiotapes of her in private moments. Karsan warned he would make the material public if she didn't pay him, police said.

Mintz said Karsan had worked for Lennon's widow for at least six years, driving her on an almost daily basis when she was in New York.

"She is one woman who has been through enough," Mintz said. "For an employee - especially a trusted employee who drove her - to attempt a shakedown has left her just absolutely shocked."

On Dec. 8, the 26th anniversary of Lennon's killing, Karsan dropped off the note and a photo of Ono in nightclothes at the Dakota apartment building, where the former Beatle once lived with her and where she still resides, police said.

Karsan, 50, talked about killing her, her son and himself during a later conversation with one of her associates, which was recorded by investigators, police said.

The audiotapes of Ono were apparently recorded while she was speaking on a phone in the car with Karsan at the wheel, Mintz said.

"You're reminded that this takes place around that time of the anniversary, when she is in a particularly vulnerable position," Mintz said. "It just adds insult to injury. This one's really cold."

On the night of Dec. 8, 1980, Lennon was returning with Ono to the Dakota from a recording studio when Mark David Chapman opened fire with a .38-calibre revolver, hitting him four times.

In Karsan's Long Island neighbourhood, people who knew him were stunned to hear of the allegations.

"He wouldnt say much about Yoko, very closed-mouthed about her, never said anything detrimental," Gertrude M. Follett, a real-estate broker who works from a house next door, told The New York Times. "He loved his job, and we always assumed she was happy with him. He was a charming man, always impeccably dressed. We never would have thought he would do what theyre saying."

British archeologist Sean Kingsley said he followed the journey of the legendary vessels for the first time since they disappeared from public view more than 1,500 years ago and traced them to their current location in this walled monastery east of Bethlehem in the Palestinian West Bank.
Kingsley's critics say there is no evidence to support his thesis, and plenty of evidence that it's ludicrous.

The vessels in question include some of the icons of biblical Judaism -- the seven-branched gold candelabrum, bejewel ed Table of the Divine Presence, and a pair of silver trumpets.

Many people, including Israeli government officials, believe the Temple vessels are hidden somewhere in the Vatican vaults. In 1996, Religious Affairs Minister Shimon Shetreet asked officially for the pope to return them. The Vatican denied the vessels were there.

Kingsley argues that the vessels were taken from Rome when it was sacked by the Vandals in AD 455.

In his new book, "God's Gold: The Quest for the Lost Temple Treasure of Jerusalem," published in Britain by John Murray and in the United States by Harper Collins next spring, Kingsley describes what he says was the odyssey of the priceless haul: from Jerusalem to Rome and back again via Carthage and Constantinople, to what he says is its final resting place at the Greek Orthodox monastery of Mar Theodosius on the edge of the Judean desert, in the village of Ubadiyah, about 6 miles east of Bethlehem.

Kingsley holds a doctorate in the arch eology of the Holy Land from Oxford University and is a visiting fellow at the Research Centre for Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at the University of Reading. He is managing editor of Minerva, the International Review of Ancient Art and Archaeology, and was one of the archeologists who discovered the largest trove of sunken treasure ever recovered off the coast of Israel.

Kingsley says his research suggests that the precious vessels were hidden in the caves under Mar Theodosius to escape the sacking of Jerusalem by Muslim invaders in AD 614.

Nuns at the monastery said there was no treasure buried at Mar Theodosius, which was itself destroyed during the same Muslim invasion and left abandoned until the late 19th century. During a visit to the caves beneath the monastery, a reporter was told that no precious artifacts had ever been recovered from the site, probably because it was left in ruins for nearly 1,300 years and any valuables there were looted by hermits and grave robbers.

Israeli specialists scoffed at Kingsley's theories.

"I've been there several times studying the skeletons of monks who were massacred by the Persians in the seventh century," said Joe Zias, an Israeli anthropologist and archeologist. "It doesn't have any such treasure, and if it did it was plundered by the Arabs or Persians centuries ago."

The story of the vessels has long fascinated historians. According to Josephus, a first-century Roman-Jewish historian, 50 tons of gold and silver vessels were plundered from the Temple by the Roman Emperor Vespasian and his son Titus during the conquest of Jerusalem in AD 70.

"Contemporary sources show that it survived on public display in the Temple of Peace in the Roman Forum from AD 75 into the early fifth century. Then it suddenly disappeared. Who stole God's gold?" Kingsley said in an interview.

According to his research, it was Gaiseric, king of the Vandals.

"In AD 455, Gaiseric looted and burnt Rome in 14 days and threw everything he could, including the Temple treasures, into ships and took them to the Temple of Carthage," he said. "They would not have liquidated the loot. It gave them power."

"In AD 534, the emperor Justinian brought the Vandal king into Constantinople. The records show that they resurrected the triumphal procession in AD 71. The historian Procopius of Ceasaria clearly describes the treasures of Jerusalem being paraded at the head of this triumph."
But the treasure did not remain in Constantinople for very long.

"The emperor Justinian was a student of classical antiquity, and he was aware that every civilization that controlled the Temple treasure had eventually been consumed by it. Fearful, he sent the treasure back to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in around AD 560," said Kingsley.
Procopius report ed that a Jewish court adviser warned Justinian about the dangers of keeping the vessels. The emperor "became afraid and quickly sent everything to the sanctuaries of the Christians in Jerusalem, " Procopius wrote.

During a subsequent Persian invasion, Kingsley argues, a monk called Modestus from the monastery at Mar Theodosius found himself in charge of the priceless vessels and hid them in the isolated desert caves at the monastery.

Kingsley said he peered over the wall of the monastery and saw evidence of archeological looting in the area, but hoped the Temple treasures -- if they are there -- would remain undisturbed.