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The Future of the Blog 144

Posted by Zonk from the blogging-it-up-when-i'm-blogging-down dept.
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.'"
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The Future of the Blog More

The Future of the Blog

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  • Um, yeah (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Putting together a blog should be as easy as sending an e-mail

    It's called Livejournal, Myspace, and Xanga. Welcome to 2001.
  • Blogging will become America(n) Online (tm) blogging...

  • Simplicity is good (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mytec ( 686565 ) * on Friday February 24, 2006 @02:27PM (#14794967) Journal

    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.

    • Re:Simplicity is good (Score:4, Funny)

      by slashdotnickname ( 882178 ) on Friday February 24, 2006 @02:55PM (#14795230)
      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.
      • Want even better blogging? Try /. You can find way more there than you can in your current directory.
      • TFA: Putting together a blog should be as easy as sending an e-mail.

        It is: just send mail to a mailing list indexed by Gmane [gmane.org] and then view the list with Gmane's blog interface [gmane.org]. 'Course, you do have to create your own mailing list first...
      • The Slashblogging idea would get you a lot of offtopic moderations, and when you hit bad Karma you could only post once a day, but that's about normal for some blogging sites like DailyKos anyway. You could possibly still comment under another name or anonymously to respond to comments to your Slashblog.
        This of course is ignoring the Journal feature provided. The biggest drawback of Slashblogging is that you don't have a copy of your blog you can just download to retain your content, should Slashdot ever

  • Blogging (Score:2, Insightful)

    by bilbravo ( 763359 )
    Am I the only person who despises this "word"?
    • "blog"
      "blogger"
      "blogging"
      "blogosphere"
      "Web 2.0"

      But then, I also find that the majority of those pages are filled with narcissistic drivel. So I'm probably overly biased.
    • Am I the only person who despises this "word"?

      In a word, no.

    • Re:Blogging (Score:1, Funny)

      by 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.
    • Am I the only person who despises this "word"?

      Well, blog, plog, podcasting,... are just the Internet Fad Du Jour [tm]. Before, blogging was called "making a website with a forum section".

      Making a website the scope of most of blogs' was not a lot harder than opening a blog today, but it did require your ISP to allow you to run server-side apps or scripts for the forum, and it required the creator of the website to get involved in some nooks and crannies to get everything looking and going nice. What the blog
    • Am I the only person who despises this "word"?

      You must be new here. ;)
    • 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 trie

    • Re:Blogging (Score:4, Funny)

      by DavidNWelton ( 142216 ) on Friday February 24, 2006 @03:32PM (#14795581) Homepage
      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.
    • 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

      • 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 pointle

    • At least you haven't run across the phrase "blog it and cog it", as in "write a update to an personal and boring online journal and then publish it to the pile of other boring online journals"... bleh!

      We should get some peace in a year or two.

    • Re:Blogging (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Gulthek ( 12570 )
      No. But it's too late to change it. Just like we are stuck with "the web" and "Internet" and all the other silly names for computer objects and ideas.

      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" di
      • Just a couple of cents for you:

        Keyboard: What else would you call it? Manual Input Device?

        Email: Remember, this is derived from electronic mail, which is precisely what it is (although I suppose they have more in common with interoffice memos [to, from, subject, etc], so perhaps they should have been called electronic memos.)

        Floppy disks: were floppy at one point, so hard disk is a viable term to differentiate the two.

        World Wide Web: described as such because the pages were intended to be, through h
        • You need to read my post again. I know the origins and logic behind these words, but I point out that they are also, quite lame.

          For example, you say:

          Floppy disks: were floppy at one point, so hard disk is a viable term to differentiate the two.

          While, I said:

          hard disk: to differentiate from "floppy" disk (also lame). certainly highlights sexual frustration

          And can you honestly say that the phrase "world wide web" isn't chock full of annoying, superfluous poetic grandeur? Oooh, it's a web of stuff. Like, like
    • Are you the only person who dislikes this word? Ugol's Law [wikipedia.org] gives us the answer: no. Ugol's Law can be thought of as an anti-Highlander principle: there is never only one!

    • It's not quite as bad as "Webinar". On the other hand, I just heard the term "webisode", and I rather like that one.

  • Good gods, no! (Score:1, Funny)

    by 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."

    • 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.

      The average joes are blogging now. Average and sub-average. They are the young, hi-tech, uber-cool, early-adopter geek-no-rati who know the difference between CSS and XHTML (and give two sh*ts) and believe that because they suddenly find themselves in possession of a printing press they have somehow magically tr
  • The easier it is to blog, the easier it is to post crap. I'm not insisting that knowing how to effectively present a blog means you're a good writer, but the expansion of the (ugh) "blogosphere" can only lead to more unmitigated crap.
    • Already, people have to wade through piles of "what I ate for breakfast" entries to see a handful of truly interesting ones. It could be said, the crap has arrived, dried out, been stepped on, and eaten by an animal for reprocessing. Should this new trend be called Crap: The Re-Emergence?

    • like books, newspapers, and pamphlets.

      All these mediums have crap, that doesn't invalidate the medium.
      • Physical media requires a larger financial investment. So that weeds out some of the less dedicated "producers".

        When a site is free, you end up with lots of "my cat is funny" and "people I hate today" junk.

        • Re:Slight difference. (Score:3, Insightful)

          by radish ( 98371 )
          You also end up with a lot if interesting, insightful stuff that wouldn't otherwise get produced, because of the high barrier to entry. Do we really want to live in a world where only rich people can afford to speak? That's how things used to be and I'm not keen to go back.

          It's not as if you're forced to read any of this stuff.
          • Do we really want to live in a world where only rich people can afford to speak?
            And what world would that be?

            It certainly isn't the US today. The cost of running off a thousand copies of a pamphlet is less than $100.

            Distributing them just takes your time.
            That's how things used to be and I'm not keen to go back.
            Yeah? In which world? Unless you consider $100 to be "rich", you're sadly mistaken.
            • I know of plenty of people who wouldn't have a spare $100 to spend on some flyer, 99% of which will end up littering the streets. What a waste. I can post something on the web and reach millions of people (or just one person), with no litter, no fuss and basically no cost. What's more, because of the way the web works I can be reasonably sure that the people reading my content are actually interested in it. Contrast that to the unpopular guy on the street handing out flyers no-one wants.

              And let's say I did

              • I know of plenty of people who wouldn't have a spare $100 to spend on some flyer, 99% of which will end up littering the streets.

                What you had said was ...

                Do we really want to live in a world where only rich people can afford to speak?

                And I've shown how just about ANYONE can afford it in the US.

                That's how it is today. That's how it has been since Franklin was publishing his pamphlets.

                You are wrong. Just deal with it.

          • High barrier to entry? You think it's cheaper to buy a computer and internet access than it is to buy some paper?
    • Right, just like when They introduced HTML, the World Wide Web, and gave all these crackers browsers. Ruined my decade, and as you say, "only led to more unmitigated crap."

      Since when did the principle of universal readership and the realization of decades' dreams of a participatory universal information database become a bad thing? Wrong side of the bed today, brother?

      If you don't like what you're clicking on, then maybe you need to query more carefully. Your wish is your machine's command.

      • Since when did the principle of universal readership and the realization of decades' dreams of a participatory universal information database become a bad thing?

        Simple answer. Blogging tools have brought regular web page authoring -- something once reserved for 1337 h@x0rz -- to the masses. Therefore, it threatens their status.

        Never mind that HTML and FTP skills (and time to mess with the tedium of copying templates, updating links, etc.) are not a prerequisite of writing skill -- or of having something i

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

    What date will they have done that by?

  • I'll tell you the future of blogging (Score:5, Insightful)

    by truthsearch ( 249536 ) on Friday February 24, 2006 @02:33PM (#14795033) Homepage Journal
    Here's the future of blogging:

    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
    • You've pretty much described the current state of things.

      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
      • There really isn't any mainstream backlash yet. It's only coming from people who are already into blogging (reading or writing).

        And google's blogsearch is hardly the evolutionary tool we need. The reading tools seriously need to get much much better at filtering out spam and things it can figure out are meaningless to us. For example, instead of seeing a stream of posts all pointing to each other figure out the meat of the issue and truely original source and show us just that.
      • "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."

        but people want to right abuot what there dog did today. The world is not forced to there doorstep, as it were. It does not need to be about entertaining you.
        • but people want to right abuot what there dog did today.

          And if they publish it in a book, it'll become a best seller! [yahoo.com]
        • It's all about audience. Some people use blogs to keep their friends updated, and don't mind if someone wanders in and sees some of what they write. These people aren't writing for a global audience, and aren't trying to get that audience.

          So it's not interesting to the vast majority of people out there. What about the 10 people to whom it *is* interesting? The web isn't like TV where you have a finite amount of air time, and every show that makes it on the air does so at the expense of another. The Int
    • For busy people, a digital camera actually makes blogging much easier. You take photos of things you do that you want to write about. Five weeks later when you find a little time, you upload those photos and type in a brief sentence or two about what you did on that date. If you have a lot of time you type in interesting details.

      After years of failing to keep my extended family updated on what I've been doing, I'm finally succeeding. And this with two kids and a third on the way.

      You're right, though

    • but what about..

      9. Profit!

      /grin/

    • 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

      And who decides what is crap? Some snobby elite with a political axe to grind? We have that today and call it the main stream media.

      Here is the latest post from Michael J. Totten in Iraq.

      http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/001064.html [michaeltotten.com]

      Reading it, you see it gives lie to the "all quagmi

      • What I'm thinking of is filtering blog entries that are little more than links to other blogs. But I also envision natural language processing getting much smarter and easily blocking out things that I don't care to waste time with. If others want to read about some stranger's cat, that's fine with me. But a good tool will know that I don't care.
    • Mainstream backlash

      There is no such thing as the "mainstream." The first search engine rendered the mass market instantly obsolete. There is no mass market.

      as the good reading tools (and people using them) ignore them

      Oh good. The free market. Let's write tools that deprive authors of an audience. Why, that's exactly the same as the "free" market now! Want proof? Twelve publishers passed on Harry Potter. ($54E803 in sales) Disney passed on the Lord of the Rings trilogy. ($6 billion box office, 1
    • (7) Sounds unlikely to me. I read the LJs of around 30 people I know, to keep up with their lives on a day to day basis. It's basically replaced the old chatty mailing lists for us. So while "big name" bloggers - the equivalent of Op-Eds - will no doubt be whittled down, the use of blogs for individuals is almost certainly here to stay.
  • BLOGS are the new trend?? I thought you said pogs... what am I supposed to do with all these [whoopis.com] now?
  • Judging by the quality of the vast majority of blogs, I don't think we necessarily need blogs to
    even EASIER to make. This would just increase the deluge of low quality, worthless blogs.

    If you thought livejournal was self-indulgent and obnoxious already...
    • People with interesting stories to tell often don't have much spare time. The current technology caters to people who want to tweak colors. To attract more writers like Paul Graham [paulgraham.com] ("In a real essay you're writing for yourself. You're thinking out loud."), we need something efficient.
    • No one's going to look through history to highlight the crap..

      I'm sure throughout history there were tons and tons of crap paintings that no one likes.. and thus never heard of again, but we're left with the truly best that are breathtaking..

      Similarly, that's like saying we shouldn't give people easy access to education or the sciences so that they won't become scientists researching crap..

      Hey, sometimes it only takes a few, but it's surely a lot easier finding a few when you have tons and tons more.. just
  • we already have mobile blogging, sending e-mail to blog, etc. You can sign up for a free flickr account and send picture "blog" type posts with e-mails to your flickr account, for example, not that I'm associated with flickr. What they mean is, they're going to try to attract every moron that doesn't have a blog to make one, which will just wreck it for anyone that's trying to do it now with blog viruses, spam, etc. Joy! :)
  • The program was designed with simplicity in mind by Mena Trott, a former graphic designer and early blogger (she launched dollarshort.org in early 2001), and her husband, Ben Trott, a programmer.
    Mena and Ben went on to found Six Apart, the San Francisco-based company behind the blog-hosting service TypePad.

    TypePad is about to get a workout.

  • FTA

    How do we design blogs that will archive and present 20 years worth of content?

    Start by using open standards for your implementations. They'll last and interoperate heterogenously without fear or favor.

  • This means more blogs with hard to read text against a clashing background, with a song by some terrible artist forced to play, at least 2 music videos, and 300 pictures of the last partay! Sweet!
  • I just had to link back to the classic typical iBlog [slashdot.org] post from a few months back . . . great stuff!
  • I can vouch for the popularity of blogging. It helps to share ideas and bring together people with similar tastes. I can't even envisage going back to the time when one had to write html code to put up a webpage.

    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 detail

  • Future? (Score:1, Troll)

    by Billosaur ( 927319 ) *

    The future of blogging... the future... blogging... hehehe... hahaha... hehehe... hohoho... oh wait, you were being serious, weren't you?

    "Blogging" has no future, because at some point someone, somewhere will write a program that will take any piece of information newly published to the Web, embellish it with stock comments, and post it to your blog. Eventually copies of this program will spread all over the globe, and unbeknowst to their hosts, will link together in a great sentient botnet, which will co

  • Quickly (Score:2)

    by p0 ( 740290 )
    anti blog joke here.
  • ...more uninformed people writing things that no one will read about stuff no one really cares about anyway. Oh, wait...
  • More and more specialized networks of blogs seems to be in the future as well. As tools like Wordpress MU (http://mu.wordpress.org [wordpress.org]) become more stable and people begin to modify them to focus on certain features like video (http://whirrl.com [whirrl.com]) or audio/podcasting I think people will find more niches to express themselves and their interests.

  • Blogging = Geocities. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Khaed ( 544779 )
    Blogging has almost become the new Geocities. Anyone remember how many tons of crappy pages there were on Geocities in the late nineties? Every thirteen year old had a goofy ass page with a midi background and talked about how cool they were, or how shitty their life was (bonus if there was goth poetry). Now, blogging is like that, because everyone can have a blog for free. It's sort of like the September that Never Ended.

    Like homepages in the 90s, there are some good blogs, but most are crap. For example:
    • Read Paul Graham's Why Nerds are Unpopular [paulgraham.com] for thoughts on the dichotomy between purposefulness and popularity contests. MySpace is set up for popularity contests. Other blogging sites aren't like that.
    • I, too, had a shitty Geocities webpage. What did I make the site about? NBA Live '96 (computer game). Did I actually think that the site was useful, or even mildly entertaining? Not a chance.

      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 u

  • The death knell (Score:3, Interesting)

    by RealProgrammer ( 723725 ) on Friday February 24, 2006 @02:57PM (#14795249) Homepage Journal
    They'll be easier for people to incorporate more media and maybe mobile capabilities.

    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.

  • Really...who is actually listening or reading to the majority of these things (including mine). For the majority, they are simply a place to vent or pontificate. Mainstream media like The Globe&Mail [theglobeandmail.com] are using the principles of blogging to enhance their online offering. Once all the other mainstream venues open up then there will no longer be a need for a private soap box with limited audience.
    • Once all the other mainstream venues open up then there will no longer be a need for a private soap box with limited audience.

      Yes, more mainstream media are now turning to constantly-updating blogs and other pages to attract the Internet audience. However, the "private soap boxes" will have as much, if not more, appeal than they do today.

      The reason is that people go to the outside blogs for perspective they aren't getting elsewhere. For example, I would not have gotten to see the Mohammed cartoons if blog
    • Once all the other mainstream venues open up then there will no longer be a need for a private soap box with limited audience.

      There is no such thing as "the mainstream." It is a myth. Like the "permanent job" and the "free market." It doesn't exist.
  • See for example:
    http://www.zonageek.com/software/files/mt/mtmail-0 .5/mtmail.html [zonageek.com]

    Anyone can blog from anywhere.
    There are RSS->blog gateways, and SMTP->RSS gateways.

    At some point someone's going to get clever and collapse all these concepts into "message atoms". Descriptive text, along with tagged URLs and attachments that are treated as a unit with an author, publish date, keywords, "parent atom" for replies, etc.

    Weblog, forum, RSS feed, email, XMPP (Jabber, Google Talk)... these are all just retrieva
  • The big fear with a diary was that someone might get ahold of it and read it.

    With a blog, the fear is that nobody will...
  • "Most people think of blogs as being primarily political or tech-focused. To most people, the important things they want to learn about have to do with people they know. So I think personal blogs are really the future, and with that comes a challenge for blogs to be more friendly and welcoming."

    Blogs have always been primarily a personal tool. The avalanche of blogs, ironically, even out the playing field. The so-called "famous bloggers" may have their clicks, but for the millions of faceless bloggers
  • The future of blogging?

    Blogs with multiple pages, rich databases of content, media, software...

    I call it a "website circa 1997". It'll be revolutionary!
  • Miguel de Icaza once said, on his own blog, that blogs are like television for the Internet. I would say that this is a pretty good analogy: you've got the "news" sites with information that you really want, like the "planet"-style aggregate blogs for open source projects, and you've got all the other crap, which is just like any other awful television show that has a cult following. In the end, the "crap" really only gets paid attention to by those that are interested (I'm alawys interested when a friend w
  • So long as there are cats, dogs, high school, bad poetry, and other substitutes for children and real lives, there will be blogs. You can bet your cat nip, chew toy, cheap digital camera, and suicide letter drafts on it.
  • My Friends and I maintain a blog about our life as a UNIX administrator. We write a diary about our day today life. It is a place where we share UNIX/Linux related tips & tools for connecting, monitoring, and troubleshooting system.
    So far, our experience is great. We can publish our thoughts online, interact with people and build community.
  • I don't understand why it seems to be "cool" to be down on the whole blogging landscape? Sometimes it sounds like we'd prefer it to be some elitist camp that only a few have access to. Maybe it's because until recently it was a pain to set up a blog (host it yourself, upload the software, configure it, etc.) and now it's becoming more mainstream?

    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 writin
  • ... it's the network of interlinking blogs (via trackback/pingback) that carry on an ongoing conversation that is the real power of the blogs. Along with RSS and Atom, which aside from just letting you read a bunch of blogs through a single interface also let sites like Technorati [technorati.com] provide a nearly real-time search of the "live" internet, blogs and the related technologies that have sprung up around them are really creating a new paradigm of information sharing. Google lets you search the static web, but T
    • I think you forgot your <shamelessPlug> tags...
  • Blogging nowadays is dead easy.

    The more immediate future of blogging is the making the multimedia aspects of blogging easier and more accessible, and incorporating that into blogs. It brings blogs into a more personal space. :-)

    Gabcast ( http://www.gabcast.com/ [gabcast.com] ) does a brilliant job at making audio posts easy, and can automagically insert episodes directly into most blog sites. It's too easy.

    Not sure if there's anything similar for video yet, but I'm sure it's coming!

  • Why not? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by nagora ( 177841 ) on Friday February 24, 2006 @03:52PM (#14795778)
    Putting together a blog should be as easy as sending an e-mail.

    Might as well remove the only remaining difference between blogs and spam.

    TWW

  • My guess is that history will repeat itself. The newsletters and pamphlets that eventually became what call newspapers started out as much more personalized expressions of opinion by those few with the resources to broadcast their views. The ones that became popular evolved into monolithic commercial enterprises pandering to the popular views of one or another group (political, religious, ethnic - take your pick). The biggest of them eventually all evolved into much the same format, just like all superma
  • I admin and/or host several blogs, and the two biggest time sucks are not the content creation or markup, as WordPress 2.0 has made that as easy as it gets. Instead, the two challenges are 1) the security of the software and/or it's underlying scripting language - e.g., Geeklog or PHP, and also, to an extent, comment spam. Both have gotten better, but if you miss a beat on the security issue, on a high volume blog you can have problems pronto.

    As it is now, WP is as hard to use as Microsoft Word. Followin

  • Hmmm (Score:2, Insightful)

    by bblboy54 ( 926265 )
    All these features as well as ease of use already exsist at Blogger [blogger.com] (a Google company). So should the article read "Typepad and LiveJournal, in the future, will embrace technology like Blogger.com"?
  • Blogging can't get much easier. Everybody and his dog can do it. Even Chewbacca has one. [blogspot.com]

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