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.'"
Re:I'll tell you the future of blogging (Score:3, Interesting)
1 - Blogging tools get a little easier
It hasn't been hard for a long time. Anyone can go to blogger.com and get a blog in like (*snap*) that.
2 - Multimedia blogging gets a little easier, but won't get heavily adopted for a long time
There are already various Video Blogging services, some with their own "easy to use" software. The problem is that it's all DULL. I'm mean, mind-numbingly-boring type dull. At least when people write, many try to apply some of the lessons they learned in school. But as this fellow demonstrates [jroller.com], many of the video bloggers just talk into the camera rather than developing a scripted session. ("Here [Uhh] I'm trying the [Uhh] JNode graphics. It doesn't [Uhh] look like it [Uhh] works. [Uhh] Here's a [Uhh] screenshot from their [Uhh] website.")
3 - Many many many more people blog
I honestly wish that many of them would go away or make them private. The world does not need to hear what your dog did today.
4 - Mainstream backlash from all the BS out there
There's plenty of that.
Just read the general comments in any forum and you'll note a lot of hostility toward bloggers. I use my blog [blogspot.com] as a method for publishing articles, but that doesn't stop people from dissing it before they bother reading.
5 - Really good tools finally crop up to make finding what you're interested in easier (Technorati but 200 times better)
blogsearch.google.com [google.com]
Granted, Technorati is likely to get you more results. However, much of Technorati's results are link-fest garbage or one-line, throw-away "journals".
6 - Many of the worst blogs die away as the good reading tools (and people using them) ignore them
Like Google Search does.
7 - If you're not one of the top 100 blogs of these tools you're basically ignored, disgruntling a LOT of people
I don't know about top 100. For example, I just did a blog search to see if I could find anyone who's gotten a free Niagara server from Sun yet. The results were very informative. (Lots of people applied, but no one has yet reported getting one. Hmmm.)
8 - A few thousand great blogs stay up for years, many consolidating, and any of the rest come and go quickly
As it already is.
Blogging = Geocities. (Score:2, Interesting)
Like homepages in the 90s, there are some good blogs, but most are crap. For example: 99% of Myspace.com.
The death knell (Score:3, Interesting)
The point of the blog is hidden cleverly in the word "blog" itself. It's short for "web log", of course, but the "log" comes from the Greek logos: word, talk, knowledge. It's about the written word.
There are lots and lots of tools available for dealing with the content of a file of text, but semanticising and analyzing other media, such as audio and video is much more difficult, and perhaps impossible. The problems range from creation (making sure that the content is what the author really wants to express) all the way through search, bandwidth, and archival. What is important about a particular video clip or other cruft in some blog? But the practicalities are just one problem.
There appears to be a need in humans to communicate using words. With words we can entertain, inform, and convey precisely the meaning we wish to convey, given our skill level.
Perhaps there is room for multimedia blogs. Perhaps their presence won't ruin the experience of reading someone else's take on things and giving our own. Perhaps it won't devolve into mere entertainment. Maybe people would rather speak and see their way around an argument.
But I suspect that when people start using the old campfire for putting on their plays and bullfights, we'll search out some new one around which to argue the great events of the day. Like Usenet before it and the pamphleteer's press before that, we won't be able to stop ourselves.
Re:Blogging (Score:3, Interesting)
Keyboard: lame, a board with keys? original
mouse: just 'cause of a cord? silly
the web (esp. the world wide web): annoying, superfluous poetic grandeur
memory: false cognate for non-computer users, in any sense except the computer usage memory is more like the hard disk and computer memory is more like "active thought"
hard disk: to differentiate from "floppy" disk (also lame). certainly highlights sexual frustration
monitor: what is it monitoring?
email: we have telegram, phone call, letter, etc. Why don't we get a new name for a new technology this time? We didn't call phone calls vmails.
e-anything: same gripe.
Hell, in light of all this we should thank our lucky stars that we actually have a real(ish) neologism with "blogging." I wouldn't have been surprised if people called them "wemails" or "public pages" (shortened to puges, or pups) or something else even more lame.