Have you catched up with the block chain?
I've noticed that bitcoind gets a lot of connections initially when started, but this gradually drops down again to only 8 and stays there while you are still catching up with the block chain. Once you're catched up, the number of connections seems to go up again. (I'm not sure if this is the expected behavior, just what I observed.)
Yes, I had it catched up. It got updated at a very high speed, so maybe my client just figured connecting to more than eight peers would've been unnecessary.