Some good comments on what a blog is, and where the blog world is going. I consider this discussion group a combination of a Blog, discussion, and an Email place.
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While there are a hell of a lot of blogs and blog readers, blogs aren't even close to being a mainstream phenomenon the way email is. It'll happen. And here are some guesses (note: guesses) about what they'll look like when they do:
1. The word "blog" will expand to cover any linkable posting (a place) where a person gets to speak her mind more than once. If it's more permanent than IM, it'll be a blog.
2. Group blogs will be at least as common as individual blogs. Most people don't have time to stoke the blogfires every day, but groups do.
3. The lines between blogs and discussions will blur. Contributing to a blog discussion requires less effort than creating your own and taking the initiative to come up with topics every day or so. The regular participants in a blog discussion will consider themselves to be blogging. (We see this beginning to happen in the comment boards of the Howard Dean blog.)
4. The lines between email and blogs will blur. Already we can post to our blog via email. But at some point, maybe we'll be able to press a button on an email to post it to the Web, with the link sent automatically to everyone on the message's cc list, creating an instant blog site that grows as the thread grows. There's no technical barrier to this, of course, and the functionality already exists already almost and kind of, but it hasn't been presented to us as a type of blogging. Something like it will be, and the ecological niche between email and blogging will be quickly filled in.
5. Corollary: Closed circulation blogs will become as important as open blogs. Closed circulation lets blogs serve the function of cc lists.
6. Corollary: Many blogs will be event-based and time-limited. I.e., we'll have Leah's Graduation Blog that lasts for a month and the Class Trip to Shenandoah Blog that lasts for two weeks.
7. Blogrolls and buddy lists will thoroughly merge somehow.
8. The distinction between the big, high-traffic blogs and the rest of the world of blogging will be increasingly sharply etched. The "tail" will gain more and more value as the number of high-traffic blogs necessarily grows much more slowly. At some point, the "A-List" bloggers won't even seem like bloggers because what they're doing is so different from what the rest of us are doing. By analogy, when I receive some massive-circ email newsletter, I don't think of it as being like email I receive from a friend, even though both are using email transport. (This doesn't mean the high-traffic blogs will be of less intrinsic value. It does mean they'll be of less value relative to the increasing cumulative value of the lower-traffic blogs.)
9. Blogs will be of increasing value to democracy.
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