The Future of the Blog 144
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.'"
Um, yeah (Score:2, Insightful)
It's called Livejournal, Myspace, and Xanga. Welcome to 2001.
Simplicity is good (Score:5, Insightful)
I think Apple understands the noted direction change. iWeb is very simple to use. While it may not be chock full of features, it does allow you to start writing your blog entry almost immediately. I chose a template, and now, much like writing a new email, the blog process is simple: I just alter the title, drop in a picture (if I want one) and write my entry. Publish. Done. With an email, I just choose a recipient, type in a subject, and finally the body of the email. Click send. Done. iWeb matches that sort of simplicity. I think for a good number of users, that direction is a good choice.
Blogging (Score:2, Insightful)
I'll tell you the future of blogging (Score:5, Insightful)
1 - Blogging tools get a little easier
2 - Multimedia blogging gets a little easier, but won't get heavily adopted for a long time
3 - Many many many more people blog
4 - Mainstream backlash from all the BS out there
5 - Really good tools finally crop up to make finding what you're interested in easier (Technorati but 200 times better)
6 - Many of the worst blogs die away as the good reading tools (and people using them) ignore them
7 - If you're not one of the top 100 blogs of these tools you're basically ignored, disgruntling a LOT of people
8 - A few thousand great blogs stay up for years, many consolidating, and any of the rest come and go quickly
Blogging has become a powerful medium (Score:2, Insightful)
Now a days blogging has become as simple as writing a document in a wordprocessor.
And the power of the blogger to shake down the established news sites is something to be taken note of. For example, I first came to know about the Sony DRM fiasco through a blog on the net where the blogger had detailed his experiences rather than through news sites or newspapers. And the sound bytes created by the bloggers did give a lot of bad publicity to sony corp.
Just what we need... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:more blogs, less content (Score:3, Insightful)
All these mediums have crap, that doesn't invalidate the medium.
Why all the negativity? (Score:2, Insightful)
Why would more people having blogs "muddy up the internet"? I agree, the vast majority of the MySpace/Livejournal group, etc. probably have no business writing and posting their crap in huge fonts, glaring colors, and unresized photos. But the fact that they can do that is what's great. No body is forcing you go to to those crappy blogs. What is the deal, then? If they want to write what they had for dinner, and a handful of their friends want to read that, then more power to them. Find the information that you are looking for on the Internet and use it, and feel free to ignore any site that you aren't interested in.
Personally, I'm glad that things are getting easier. I still host my own, but things like Wordpress have made leaps and bounds in improvements in the last few releases. It is becoming easier and easier to write what you want to write. And look at it this way - the more people able to get their ideas out to where others can find them, maybe the closer we can get to having a better understand of what "makes everyone tick". Just my $.02.
Re:Blogging = Geocities. (Score:2, Insightful)
The point is that I learned how to write HTML using Geocities...when I was 13. And no one was forced to read it; it wasn't delivered to peoples' inboxes or anything like that.
Perhaps we can look at blogs under the same light. Blogs can be used as a tool for people to learn how to write more clearly. They can be used as a tool for people to learn how to express their emotions.
Sure, we can all comment on what percentage of blogs are crap, as you seem to have done. But what really irks me is that people seem that blogs as a whole should go away because of the average quality. Well, along those lines, we could also go ahead and get rid of newspapers, magazines, and television shows.
Why not? (Score:3, Insightful)
Might as well remove the only remaining difference between blogs and spam.
TWW
Hmmm (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Slight difference. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not as if you're forced to read any of this stuff.