Yeah its pretty much dead.  The only reason it was booming was massive speculation and major news reports.  After the bubble was popped with serious theft and hacking of mtgox people lost interest seeing how volatile it is.  With the recent difficulty increase you can see just how many have lost interest since the next difficulty is expected to be a 3% increase, no where near previous increases.  Added to that people like me, I mined on my otherwise idle 6950 for the hell of it, now that profit is down to a few dollars per day its not really worth the hassle, thanks for the $ speculators, moving on...  As less and less people use bitcoin the value of it will fall since it has no inherent value...  The good news for the bitcoin community with the boom over and all the people who wasted their hard earned money on dedicated rigs hopes and dreams swirling in the toilet, the price may finally stabilize in the single digits, thus promoting actually using bitcoin for goods since vendors can depend on a price.

immediate:
0 or negative growth in mining due to difficulty
decline in value to $1-$5 due to speculators selling out

over months:
stabilization of value
increase in use of bitcoin in real goods
slow growth in value and usage