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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.'"
Putting together a blog should be as easy as sending an e-mail
It's called Livejournal, Myspace, and Xanga. Welcome to 2001.
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.
Am I the only person who despises this "word"?
Starmen.net
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
Developers: We can use your help.
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 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.
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...more uninformed people writing things that no one will read about stuff no one really cares about anyway. Oh, wait...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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: 99% of Myspace.com.
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.
sigs, as if you care.
like books, newspapers, and pamphlets.
All these mediums have crap, that doesn't invalidate the medium.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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 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.
Might as well remove the only remaining difference between blogs and spam.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
All these features as well as ease of use already exsist at Blogger (a Google company). So should the article read "Typepad and LiveJournal, in the future, will embrace technology like Blogger.com"?
Was that deliberate satire?
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
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.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"