Future for Internet Blogging

Blogging can be said now to be right up there with the printing press when it comes to sharing ideas according to Wharton legal professor Dan Hunter in an article on the website http://news.cnet.com/the-future-of-blogging

“At it’s most basic level it’s a technology that is lowering the cost of publishing” says his associate Kevin Werbach. Despite all these grandiose statements they never get down to the core issue and question of what is next on the horizon for the blog.

There is a piece on the website www.problogger.com that gets right to the point and answers the question “Whats next in blogging (or beyond blogging)?

On the article it is argued that blogs are not in the ‘past’ – but in a period of consolidation and extension and that these are the activities that a lot of bloggers are looking towards in the future

• adding authors – group blogs are the new black
• clustering blogs around verticals – bloggers extending their blogs by adding sibling blogs on related topics
• networking – 2006 was really the year of the blog network but it continues to happen in both loose and formal ways. Many of the blog networks didn’t really survive but there are quite a few that continue to bubble away and sustain themselves
• adding services and features - whether it be video, podcasts, forums, job boards, classifieds, chat features, voting tools… many bloggers are beginning to add interesting features to their blogs that attempt to add value to blogs. I think what we’re seeing is bloggers more willing to see the limitations of blogs and wanting to blur the edges of what is and isn’t a blog.

While this may be true at the moment it’s my opinion that it is hard to accurately predict the path that online blogging will take.