The Future of the Blog

conq writes "BusinessWeek has an interesting interview with Six Apart, the company behind LiveJournal and Movable Type, about the future of blogging and the role of the blogger. From the article: 'I think blog tools can get easier to use. Putting together a blog should be as easy as sending an e-mail. I foresee the next versions of blog tools as focusing less on features that appeal to early adopters. They'll be easier for people to incorporate more media and maybe mobile capabilities. This will be important, because many more mainstream users will come to blogging. I believe the interest in blogging is just starting.'"

Good gods, no!

[Anonymous Coward]

This will be important, because many more mainstream users will come to blogging.

If the existing deluge of boring, pointless, and inane blogs are made up by those who are non-mainstream, I shudder to think of what the web will look like once every other Average Joe is blogging.

"Tuesday, February 21, 2006: bought milk."

"Wednesday, February 22, 2006: Saw a cow on the way to work. It was brown. Moo."

"Thursday, February 23, 2006: Cow still there. Gotta remember to buy steaks tonight."

Re:Blogging

[Anonymous Coward]

well... it just must not be cool to have a 'website' anymore.
but call it a 'blog' and watch the girls line up.

Re:Simplicity is good

[slashdotnickname]

iWeb matches that sort of simplicity.

Want simpler blogging? You have to go no further than ./

Just post a typical blog-style long rant on any thread. Sure it might get modded down as irrelevant or flamebait, but your blog's "home page" would be your user history page so it will always be easily reachable.

Plus, the peer-review scoring aspect would help others decide if they should waste time reading your stuff or not. Plenty of times, while searching on Google, I come across blogs that I wished were modded down to "useless crap" so they wouldn't clutter my search results.

Re:Blogging

[BecomingLumberg]

The word is okay, or at least it was until Wolf Blitzer and the rest of the News World Order decided that the blogs were the new revolution in American culture. Remember how in 2004 you couldn't hear an article without cutting to an excerpt to some loser's blog. Hell, CNN started having Blogzone or Blogwatch or whatever they called it, that consisted of a girl pulling up a webpage and summarizing it for you.

My brain crapped its skull.

That night, my friends and I made up our own political blog where we tried to make up new buzzwords (you guys in IT know how much fun this can be to see if you can get the CIO to use them at the next department meeting) and see if we could get some news coverage. It didn't work, but there were a whole bunch of funny dick and fart jokes posted, so I call it a draw.

Re:Blogging

[DavidNWelton]

blog

n : something particularly smelly and disgusting that is so difficult to remove from your toilet drain that you must call a professional to extract it.

Re:Yeah, man!

[mollymoo]

I hate it too. It's become quite the buzzword. Also, no offense to most people who "blog", it seems like many of the "blogs" I've read are totally pointless. Stuff like

"So today I was feeling kinda tired and like, I went for a walk and stopped at the local McDonalds. I had a hamburger and it was good but not as good as they usually are... Dunno. I guess it's 'cause I was tired. Then I met up with John..."

Yeah, I know they're not all like that. But most of the ones which I've seen were mostly pointless and kind of boring.

Was that deliberate satire?