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.'"

Comments

Simplicity is good

[mytec]

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

[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.

I'll tell you the future of blogging

[truthsearch]

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

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.